There's change afoot in the
nation's forests. Timber companies have begun making more money on land
sales than timber sales, and developers are quick to buy remote tracts for
second home and vacation resorts. Living on Earth's Ashley Ahearn takes a
look at what this national trend means for the Moosehead Lake region in
Northern Maine.
Transcript:
CURWOOD: More than half of the forestland in the
United States is privately owned, almost a third of it by timber companies.
Increasingly, companies that used to wait for their investments to grow on
the stump are now looking for quicker returns, and in some cases that means
real estate development. Living on Earth's Ashley Ahearn visited the
Moosehead Lake region in Maine, where some of the decline in the pulp and
paper industry is set to be replaced by a large crop of vacation homes.
WOMAN: Alright, but now would you please join me
and rise for our national anthem. And it's played by Ethan Pelletier.
[FIRST FEW NOTES]
AHEARN: March in Greenville, ME, is down time.
Vacationers who swell the small lake town's population in other seasons are
absent for the cold muddy transition from winter to spring. The folks
gathered in the Greenville high school auditorium for this year's talent
show are the lifeblood of the community.
[LAST FEW NOTES OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER AND
SOME APPLAUSE]
AHEARN: Twenty-one students will graduate from
Greenville High this year. The incoming freshmen class numbers just 14.
SMITH: We've lost a lot of students.
AHEARN: Cory Smith became the principal of
Greenville High five years ago.
SMITH: My first year here we were at 315 students.
We're down to 255 this year, and we'll probably be somewhere between 245 and
250 next year.
AHEARN: The drop in students isn't because people
are leaving. It's because young people and families aren't coming to
Greenville. There just aren't many jobs here anymore. The boom days for the
paper and timber industries of Maine's North Woods are over; operations
out-sourced to South America or China, and forest jobs lost to
mechanization.
Mainers have been living with the logging industry
for more than a hundred years. Ninety-five percent of the state is privately
owned, almost half of it by large timber companies. So when the Plum Creek
Timber Company bought 900,000 acres in Maine in 1998, no one thought much
would change.
But a year later something unexpected happened.
Plum Creek Timber became the Plum Creek Real Estate Investment Trust.
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Click on map to enlarge. (Map courtesy of the Evergreen Lodge,
Moosehead Lake.)
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DRAFFAN: Here's Plum Creek with 900,000 acres in
Maine that it just bought, but it has no wood or paper manufacturing
operations up there. It is basically a real estate company that's
liquidating its properties.
AHEARN: George Draffan has researched the timber
industry extensively and co-authored the book "Strangely Like War: The
Global Assault on the World's Forests." In recent years, Draffan says Plum
Creek has begun selling some of its holdings to developers who turn
timberland into second homes and vacation resorts. Most notable, The
Yellowstone Club, a 13,000 acre exclusive resort near the Big Sky ski area
in Montana, and the Mountain Star Resort in Central Washington, which
Draffan says covers six thousand acres and features.
DRAFFAN: Thousands of houses, hundreds of hotel
rooms and condos, golf courses, a conference center, a spa, an ice rink –
the thing goes on and on.
AHEARN: Timber companies can buy remote tracts of
forest for as little as $200 an acre, and then sell plots, like those at
Mountain Star, for as much as a million dollars an acre. According to the
company's annual reports, Plum Creek's real estate income has tripled since
2003, and now totals $140 million. Other large timberland owners are showing
similar increases in land sales.
DRAFFAN: It ends up being maybe ten percent of
their revenues in any given year, but it's often up to 50 percent of their
profit.
AHEARN: But in Maine, Plum Creek realized business
as usual wouldn't work. The Maine Land Use Regulatory Commission is the
state body that approves development plans for everything from a guy who
wants to build a new dock on his camp, to the 426,000 acre concept plan Plum
Creek put together for Moosehead last year. So the company had to tailor its
operations to meet the state's requirements. And it hired Luke Muzzy.
MUZZY: I was excited about working for Plum Creek
because I know I could use my knowledge of this area to make a plan that was
gonna be good for Plum Creek and good for this area.
AHEARN: Muzzy's family has been in Greenville for
five generations. Last April, he sold his successful real estate business to
take a job as Senior Land Asset Manager for Plum Creek. He says the company
has a unique opportunity to give the region what's it never had before: a
defined structure to future development.
MUZZY: To live here, and bringin' kids up here, and
to have that unpredictability, you know, it was hard. How can you write a
business plan and hire people and expand when everything around you is owned
by somebody else, and you don't know what's going to happen with it?
AHEARN: Muzzy helped develop Plum Creek's initial
plan for Moosehead, which was turned down by the Land Use Regulatory
Commission. They said development needed to be more concentrated near
existing towns, more land put into permanent conservation, and more
affordable housing made available near the town of Greenville.
Plum Creek also proposed a 3,000 acre resort on
Moosehead Lake, which many critics said was too big. The company is
currently in talks with land conservation groups about permanent
classification of roughly a third of its Maine lands as working forests.
Muzzy says Plum Creek's soon-to-be-released revised plan will put people at
ease.
MUZZY: I'll be able to look people in the eye and
just say this is a great plan that has the potential to give this area
predictability, and to keep the vitality of the town alive.
AHEARN: Area business owners like Fred Candeloro,
who runs the Kokadjo Trading Post and Camps, grudgingly acknowledge the need
for organized development and are putting a lot of faith in Plum Creek.
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Fred Candeloro, owner of the Kokadjo Trading Post and Camps stands
in front of his business. (Photo: Ashley Ahearn)
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CANDELORO: Given the choice, none of us ever want
to see any more development where we live. It's ours and we don't anybody
else in our space. That's natural. Then we have to come down to reality. And
the reality is that if we have a planned development that's constructive,
versus a free-for-all like it's been for the last hundred years, I'd have to
go along with Plum Creek. Because, so far, they've been the only ones to
say, 'you know what? Let's put a halt to this. We'll develop this much and
be done with it.'
AHEARN: But no matter how scaled back Plum Creek's
new plan may be, there are those who say development will fragment
Mooshead's precious wilderness corridor.
BORETOS: I am still enthralled with the peace of
not hearing man-made things here.
AHEARN: Diane Boretos is an ecologist and
experienced wildlife tracker. She's standing at the edge of a pond where
Plum Creek has proposed 30 housing lots.
BORETOS: We as humans are so myopic. We're only one
of hundreds of thousands of species, and this is where they live. And
there's a wholeness in wild places like this that speaks to our hearts and
souls and that's why, for me anyways, I have to come to places like this to
be reminded of that wholeness.
AHEARN: There's no question that development on
Moosehead Lake will disrupt wildlife, but a recent study by the Manomet
Maine Center for Conservation Science says the footprint may be smaller than
expected. John Hagan, who co-authored the study, says that although large
landowners like Plum Creek might sell off parts of their land for
development, they're more careful managers of biodiversity on the working
forests they keep. Hagan says smaller investors are more pressed for quick
returns on their land purchases.
HAGAN: If you only own 50,000 or a 100,000 acres of
timberland, you're on the smaller end of the scale and you literally may not
be able to afford to do all of these wonderful new forest management
practices for biodiversity.
AHEARN: Hagan says that as the map of the nation's
forestland changes, there's a larger conversation to be had.
HAGAN: The public is only now starting to figure
out that this land ownership change is happening. And I think once the
public catches on they're gonna start to demand this conversation. We have
to be thinking about, as a society, what do we want our forests to look like
and what do we want them to be used for?
AHEARN: But for now, in the thawing woods of
northern Maine at least, the focus is on the slushy expanse of Moosehead
Lake. There's a sense of waiting here. Waiting to see how Plum Creek's new
development plan will change the region, and whether it will bring new jobs
and new people here to put down roots where trees used to grow.
[MUSIC: Addie Pelletier performing "Forever Young"
live by Alphaville from the 'Greenfield, Maine Talent Show' (March 2006)]
For Living on Earth, I'm Ashley Ahearn in
Greenville, Maine.
