A Forest Accord – How one land trust conserved more than 1 million acres of the last great forest in the American East
It is a warm June day in Maine, in the North American East, and you decide to hike on the Appalachian Trail. You pick a moderate mountain, about a kilometer tall. At first, the path winds through hardwood forest—mostly maples (Acer spp.), beech (Fagus americana), and birch (Betula spp.). You cross a small stream, hopping over Trillium flowers and lady’s slipper orchids (Cypripedium reginae) that have popped up through the leaf-duff. You begin to climb, and the forest changes; now it is mostly spruce (Picea spp.) and balsam fir (Abies balsamea). You pick your way around gray granite boulders that have cleaved off the mountainside, or were left behind, thousands of years ago, by glaciers. You swat at black flies.
Forests stretch out in every direction, except where it’s wet—kettle bogs, river floodplains, wetlands, peatlands, streams, lakes, and ponds—all flowing with clean, cold water.
Maine’s North Woods is the largest block of forestland that remains in the American East, the heart of the New England/Acadian Forest of the United States and Canada. Maine is a Northern Forest state—along with Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York—which, together, form the largest continuous forest in the eastern U.S. In Maine, 12 million acres of virtually unbroken woodlands contain 5,000 lakes and ponds, more than 4,000 miles of rivers and streams, and hundreds of mountain peaks. These woods are home to an abundance of fauna rarely, if ever, found in southern New England: the American marten (Martes Americana), North American moose (Alces alces), Eastern brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), and Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis). It is one of the few places left in the American East with near-pristine night skies, yet unpolluted by urban lights.
This is not a landscape that can be described as “wilderness”—wild, yes, but not wilderness. Visitors are welcome, but they must be self-reliant. Maine’s North Woods are no national park—you’ll find no flush toilets, giftshops, or wi-fi hot-spots, here. The forest is crisscrossed by a maze of gravel roads, ruled by trucks that can be loaded with more than 400,000 pounds (200,000 kilos) of wood or pulp. It is a patchwork of stands in various stages of harvest and regrowth, where most trees are less than fifty years old. It is a landscape owned by industrial logging companies, timber investment groups, and a handful of private families and individuals. It is also a place where millions of acres have been conserved.
More than four million acres in Maine is held in conservation, roughly 20% of the state. It’s a number that has grown, according to a 2019 report, four-fold in only three decades. But what’s particularly striking about land conservation in Maine is the widespread use of conservation easements.
Conservation easements are deed restrictions that permanently prohibit development. Landowners enter into easement agreements, voluntarily, and are typically compensated for the sale through a cash payment or in federal and state income tax reductions. More than half of Maine’s conserved lands are protected by no-development easements, and the vast majority of these transactions have been negotiated by land trusts—not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations that use private donations and grants to conserve land.
Most easements require years of negotiation to bring to fruition. They are written to last “in perpetuity,” so their terms require careful consideration. Many land trusts retain a “forever” responsibility to uphold and enforce easements’ terms.
One such trust is the Forest Society of Maine (FSM). In 36 years, FSM has conserved, with the help of its partners, more than one million acres—all with a staff of less than ten individuals. More than 90% of lands that FSM has conserved are working forests. The trust’s unique mission—to conserve a slate of ecological, economical, recreational, and cultural values—helped grow it into a national leader in working lands conservation, at the exact moment that Maine needed it, most.
In 1988, paper-making giant Diamond International Corporation placed one million acres in the Northern Forest states on the market. It got the attention two federal legislators, Senators Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. The magnitude of the sale concerned them, but they were more worried by the way the lands were marketed—not just for growing and cutting timber, but for other, non-forest uses, like real estate development.
Senators Leahy and Rudman pushed Congress to launch a federally funded study. The results were published in 1990. A key recommendation was to create a Northern Forest Lands Council—consisting of representatives of all four states, and the federal government—to continue the study’s work. Fundamental changes seemed to loom on the horizon, and there was little agreement about what to do, next. In 1994, they published thirty-seven recommendations in Finding Common Ground: Conserving the Northern Forest.
The impact of the report was manifold. It identified easements as an important tool for conserving private lands. It called on the federal government to invest in Northern Forest conservation. (Since 1994, Maine has received some $76 million in federal funds to conserve working forests.) It also gave voice to thousands of stakeholders, and united a diversity of interests—environmentalists, landowners, recreationists, foresters, rural community members, and others—around a common goal: to shape the future of their forest.
One lesson learned from the Diamond sale was that turnover of land could be an opportunity for conservation. Significant purchases had been made by land trusts and state governments in New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont. It stood to reason that similar opportunities might be possible, in Maine, where changes in ownership were reaching seismic levels. A report to the Maine State Legislature in 2000 stated that more than nine million acres of Maine forestlands changed hands between 1990 and 1999.
“But it was clear that there wasn’t the land trust infrastructure in the Maine woods to take advantage of it,” says Jay Espy, Aan award-winning conservationist based in Maine.
There’s was, however, a precedent for conservation. In 1984—a full ten years before Finding Common Ground—deed restrictions were placed on 20,000 acres in Attean Township in far western Maine. After generations of managing forests, the landowning family was ready to move on. Still, they wanted certain assurances: that their family’s land would not subdivided and developed, that timber harvesting would continue, and that the woods and waters would remain open to the public for recreation.
There was, at the time, no land trust for the forests of Maine, but there was one in neighboring New Hampshire. The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests (SPNHF) recognized the exceptional qualities of the Attean lands and agreed to take the easement on. In order to legally hold conservation interests in Maine, SPNHF created—on paper—a new organization called the Forest Society of Maine.
“The executive director at SPNHF came to us and said, ‘Maine Coast Heritage Trust should take this Attean easement on,’” says Espy, who was the executive director of MCHT at the time. “But we had plenty of work on the Maine coast, and a lot invested in the concept. So, we got people around the table and asked, ‘Is there a better approach?’” Espy believed that Maine needed a new land trust. “An organization,” he says, representative of the kinds of landowners it would work for. “People recognized that there would need to be a land trust different from any other that had come before.
The decision to create a new organization “was not unanimous in the land conservation community,” says Jerry Bley, a land conservation consultant. “But there was this sense that changes were afoot in the Maine woods and that conservation should be a part of that.”
Remaking FSM into a fully-fledged land trust emerged as a kind of compromise. Bley, Espy, and others began to assemble a board of directors, conscious of their responsibility to bring different interests to the table. “We had 50% forest products and landowning folks, and 50% conservation folks,” Bley says, “and it gelled from Day One.”
One million acres. It’s a big number, and a big story—so big that naming every person who had a hand in making the Forest Society of Maine what it came to be—one of the largest land trusts in America, in terms of acres held—is impossible to do, here. But this record will not omit one of the foremost figures in FSM’s history: Alan Hutchinson, its first executive director
Beginning in 1997, Hutchinson liked to joke that his original FSM office was his kitchen table. Alan’s first project was 21,000 acres of forest land along Nicatous Lake. In 2003, he took on the West Branch project, which placed 282,000 acres in easement and transferred more than 50,000 acres in conservation to the state. There was the 359,000-acre Moosehead Region project, in 2009, and dozens more—in his twenty years at FSM, Hutchinson helped to facilitate some of the largest land conservation deals in U.S. history. He died, unexpectedly, in August 2017.
Maine Senator Angus King, in remarks archived in the U.S. Congressional Record, called Hutchinson a “tireless environmental advocate” who “dedicated his life to preserving Maine’s most precious land, water, and wildlife.”
The Forest Society of Maine holds easements on more than 800,000 forest land acres, and manages easements covering another 200,000 acres for other organizations – protecting a total of over 1,000,000 acres.
Karin Tilberg, current executive director at the Forest Society of Maine and a conservation attorney who has worked in the Northern Forest states for decades, was deeply involved in the Council’s regional and state discussions.
“Maine people knew what they valued—access to land, managed forests, habitat for fish and wildlife, a tradition of private ownership, and opportunities outdoor recreation,” she recalls. “Conservation projects that secured these central values brought along strong public support.” (Maine citizens have voted six times in referendum to fund state conservation through public bonds.) Available funds, common goals, and conservation easements were “a unique recipe,” Tilberg says, that “helped bring about an incredible surge of conservation.”
Conservation work continues. A recent report by the Maine Forest Service shows that, for the first time in over a century, the state is losing wooded land. Development creeps ever-northward. Global climate change only raises the stakes: keeping forests as forests is fundamental to offset human carbon emissions. Conserving the last great forest in the American East has become an effort of international import.
Maine people know what they want—they want to live in the woods, in close-knit communities, far away from urban life. They have embraced easements as a way of protecting what they already have. Rugged mountains. Working woods. Cold water. Fish. Wildlife. And many, many trees.
Reference: www.fsmaine.org
