By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future writer

The names paper manufacturers give to the printing and writing papers that most people come across in their regular workday can be, well, a little boring. They're heavy on words like premium, or gold, gloss or matte, silk, or super. It is hard, after all, to try to distinguish something that is white and flat from something else that's white and flat.

But the names of Sappi Westbrook's papers are jazzy. Edgy. Hip. Playful. Sexy, even. Names like Disco, Gobi. Crinkle. Moxie. Aries, Quarry. Winner. Mojo. Splat. Sequins. Vibe. Pink Toby. Ambrosia. The list goes on.

That's because the venerable southern Maine paper mill isn't just selling paper.

It's selling textures. It's selling fashion. It's selling design. It's the world leader in making release papers that are used in manufacturing synthetic leathers and fabrics for everything from soccer balls to briefcases, athletic shoes to car wrap.

“We really are a specialties mill,” said Mill Manager Donna Cassese. “ We want to be known around the world as the leading source for functional textures. We're not selling paper, we're selling textures. That's the first thing to remember.”

The slogan on Sappi release papers' website sums it up well: Sappi makes the paper. Paper makes the texture. Texture makes the difference. Imagine the texture possibilities.

Sappi Westbrook Mill Manager Donna Cassese shows off some of the thousands of products made using the mill's release papers. (Photo: The Rankin File)For most people paper is a throwaway product, used to wrap a sandwich or feed the computer printer. Release papers are part of a manufacturing process. Basically they're papers that are spread with another substance, then the two are peeled apart. Sappi Westbrook's release papers, they're “printed” or embossed with original textures or designs that transfer to the fabric they're being used to produce.

“Our product is paper. It has a coating on it and an engraved design in it,” Cassese explains. “We sell a roll of paper to a caster, who pours vinyl onto it. Think of the paper as a mold. It's called release paper because you can release the vinyl from the paper and the paper can be reused.”

Release papers have been around for decades. These days they're used to produce PVC and urethane fabrics used in a zillion products that line the shelves of boutiques and big box stores alike. The market is global. And Sappi Westbrook is a key player in it. Cassese said the mill is the largest producer of release papers in the world, though the company doesn't want to publicize its exact market share.

One interesting fact: Less than 10 percent of Sappi Westbrook's sales are in North America; 60 percent are in China. Yes, China.

Not bad for an aging paper mill

The Westbrook mill has been around since the 1700s, when it was founded on the banks of the Presumpscot River.

In 1854, Samuel Dennis Warren acquired it for $28,000 and went on to build the biggest paper company in the country. The Westbrook mill has a long history of innovation. Among its firsts: it was the first to blend wood fiber with pulped rags to make paper, the first coated paper, the first two-sided coated paper, the first dull-coated paper and the first 100 percent fidelity release paper.

The Mill added the release paper business in 1947. It was new technology developed by a Connecticut company that was looking to make a better flowered shower curtain. Scott Paper Co. acquired Warren in 1967; in 1994 Sappi, a South African company, acquired Scott's Skowhegan and Westbrook mills. The company also owns a mill in Minnesota.

Sappi shut down the Westbrook facility's pulp mill in 1999 and in 2001 the mill stopped making printing papers and began focusing on the release paper business.

“We were never going to compete with the paper machines at Skowhegan, for instance, with the paper machines we had here,” said Cassese. “We're in a niche business. The value is from four to 10 times what printing and publishing would be. And so we are really in a unique specialty business that works well with the infrastructure we have here.”

Cassese grew up in the Bronx and came to the University of Maine to study forestry, without, admittedly, having a whole lot of acquaintance with actual trees. She loves to tell the story about a class where the professor gave new students a 10-question tree identification quiz. She put down “Christmas tree” for all 10. The prof gently suggested that she might want to consider another major, but she persevered. After graduation Cassese spent years as a forester in northern Somerset County and later in management at Sappi's Skowhegan Mill before taking the helm at Westbrook four years ago.

Cassese moves quickly through the labyrinthine mill complex like she's still striding through the woods, all the while admonishing visitors to stay within the lines painted on the floor, to watch their step in the doorways. Safety is always on her mind. One of her objectives at the mill is zero injuries. The mill is as neat as a pin, clean as an operating room.

Cassese gives off the vibes of a person who lives and breathes her work. She greets every employee by first name. She extols her “fantastic, crackerjack leadership team” and the mill's “very experienced, very dedicated” workforce of about 330 people. Many have worked there for 30 or 40 years. Some are the second, or even third, generation of their family to work there.

Today the mill has one paper machine, and it has one customer: the mill's release paper business. It makes the base paper, rolls of which are then trundled across the Presumpscot River to the other side of the mill, where it is coated and embossed, or textured.

Getting your head around release papers and how they are produced and used can be a little tough. But if you're reading magazines you're looking at coated paper. The coating on release papers is heavier, and has chemicals in it that allow vinyl or urethane materials spread on the paper to peel away and the paper to be reused.

Sappi Westbrook sells its release paper to “casters,” the people who are making the leather-like textured coverings used by manufacturers of everything from soccer balls to dashboards to coats and athletic shoes.

“We want textures that support both the functional needs of the customers and the aesthetic needs. We want something that looks nice, that would be hot on the fashion market, but it also has to work in their factory,” said Cassese. “Frankly that can be challenging for us. Because the surface chemistries our customers use are different in Europe and North America and China. So we have to have a very robust product. We also have to capture their business cycle. So if we don't get a texture in until next month we will have missed the spring fashion season.”

The mill has a slew of “evergreen patterns,” timeless textures that casters are always willing to come back to. But a lot of customers want new textures or patterns, and the mill creates them. They have created hundreds, and have a library of shiny, engraved embossing rolls. (Sometimes two of the more popular ones, just as a backup.)

Often the mill will create a new texture and then give the customer exclusive rights to use it for a period. After that time is up the texture can be used by other casters and manufacturers for other products.

Cassese holds up an athletic shoe. “This is Nike professional shoe. We designed the pattern for them, as an exclusive for Nike. It's called Camo. The neat part of the design is it's not only aesthetic, but it grips the ball better so you can kick it better. This is a very popular professional shoe. The design ended up going off the exclusive list because they want new stuff and the Chinese decided that it would make a fun flooring. So now Camo is being used for these courts where people are playing ping-pong in these gymnasiums. So it's gone from being a soccer shoe to flooring.”

Mike Knaup inspects a sample of release paper, looking for minute defects. (Photo: The Rankin File)Cassese then shows off a fancy, sleek Gucci jacket. She said a Sappi employee happened to be in New York City and went past a Gucci store and saw a beautiful jacket of super shiny leather. Looking closer, he realized that it was made using the Westbrook mill's release paper.

When you buy genuine leather, often Sappi's product probably had a part in creating it. Split grain leather frequently has a textured, or even smooth, vinyl or urethane outer finish bonded to the actual leather.

Sappi makes two grades of release paper.

“Classic” is what the company calls a “value product.” In making Classic release paper the engraved roll presses a pattern into the coating. But, because the embossing is done mechanically, it rebounds a little, so the pattern isn't as crisp, it loses some “fidelity,” as Cassese puts it.

In Sappi's proprietary Ultracast line of release papers, however, electron beams are used to cure the coating against the embossing roll. That means vinyl made using that release paper will have the exact same texture this year as it did from paper manufactured five years ago.

A worker at the controls of the Westbrook mill's machine, which makes the base paper for its release papers. In the background are finished rolls ready to be taken to the coating-embossing machine. (Photo: The Rankin File)Dale Johnson of Uniroyal Engineered Products said his company makes its trademarked Naugahyde artificial leather using Sappi release papers. “It starts out as a liquid and we pour it on to Sappi paper to bake it into a solid,” said Johnson.

Uniroyal prefers Sappi papers because they're “higher quality than its competitors. We are able to reuse the paper many more times than the other suppliers,” said Johnson. “Sappi seems to be on the cutting edge of developing new products and improving existing ones.”

It takes six to eight months to design a new texture and get an engraved roll made. “One of our primary research focuses now is on reducing that. We'd like to be able to do it in two weeks, get the idea and 'boom' get it out in the marketplace,” said Cassese.

Renee McPherson, a Sappi customer service manager, said in her job she can be in touch daily with Sappi sales offices around the globe. At the same time, she can get up from her desk and walk out to the mill floor to talk with the people running the machines. It allows her to resolve problems quickly, she said. And Sappi's North American research and development center is right next door.

McPherson said the Westbrook mill's edge in the market is its ability to beat delivery dates. Rolls of release paper are usually shipped by container ship to China, but the mill has been known to put a roll on a plane if a customer needs it yesterday.

Cassese said another edge Sappi enjoys is its patterns, and employees' ability to generate new ones. “We think we are the most fashion ready of producers.”

The market for release papers has been fairly static, said Bart Johnson, Sappi Westbrook's director of global sales. Demand for products made using release papers has been increasing as developing countries move toward a consumer society. But cost-conscious manufacturers of synthetic fabrics, especially in China, get the most out of their release paper, using it 70 or 100 times before it falls apart. Between runs workers using masking tape pull contaminants off it. That's possible only because of cheap labor. In Europe they might use a roll for 10 to 15 runs.

Sappi Westbrook is always looking for new uses for release papers, and emerging markets.

While the mill is imprinting textures on release paper, that's not all they're working with. The company developed a technique to imprint textures on clear film for use in privacy glass, a popular product in Japan. And it's done the same for laminate flooring.

Car wrap is a new use. In that process workers apply a textured vinyl covering to your car. It protects the original paint job while giving you a look you can't get with paint. A popular pattern is Alloy, said Johnson. It makes it look like brushed aluminum. Another new market is making textured wall coverings used in hotels, casinos, and karaoke bars.

The Westbrook mill is building on a long history of innovation and creativity. It may be the global market leader in release papers, but it's not resting on its pattern library. It is, as the Sappi slogan says, imagining the texture possibilities.

“At Sappi, innovation is a key priority,” said Cassese. “We continuously strive to achieve and surpass yesterday's goals. Expectations are high and we do our best to meet them.”

Joe Rankin has written about forestry and the forest products sector for more than 30 years. He always loves a good mill tour.

By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

When most people think about public lands in Maine, they think state parks like Mt. Blue or Two Lights. Or maybe Baxter State Park and Katahdin. Acadia National Park, maybe. But there is a whole other category of public land in the state – the public reserved lands system.

Some 600,000 acres where recreation opportunities abound and vast stands of timber are managed for sustained yield. Parcels range from the tiny to the tremendous. Each has its own characteristics.

Hikers take a break on the stunning Cutler Coast Unit's Bold Coast Trail. (Photo: Bureau of Parks and Lands)They range from the chattering cobble beaches of the foggy Bold Coast to the heights of the Bigelow Range From old growth hemlocks of Scraggly Lake to the Middle Earth-like spruce-fir forests of the Four Ponds near Rangeley. From the Richardson Lakes on the New Hampshire line to tiny and remote trout ponds where the sounds of the modern world fade from the mind.

These lands provide countless opportunities for camping, fishing, hunting, kayaking, wildlife watching, climbing and hiking.

Not as well known, or as heavily used, as state parks, the public lands are getting more attention as the Bureau of Parks and Lands does more to publicize them and more people seek out less developed recreation opportunities.

Forests for Maine's Future sat down recently with Tom Morrison, a veteran state land manager and the director of operations at the Bureau of Parks and Lands, to talk about the reserved lands system. For more information, check out the Bureau's 2011 report to the Maine Legislature.

Give us an overview of the Maine public reserved lands system.

There are 591,000 acres of public reserved land and a little over 7,000 acres of non-reserved land, so just shy of 600,000 acres. The parcels range from as small as 60 acres to over 47,000 acres, the largest one being the Nahmakanta Unit.

What is the difference between reserved and non-reserved lands?

The reserved lands had their origin in the state's original public lots. The non-reserved lands are lands the state acquired over the years. In a lot of cases they were part of another institution that no longer needed them. In Hebron public lands were once part of a sanitarium. In Thomaston there are public lands that were part of the prison. The difference is that non-reserved lands have been assigned to the bureau to manage until there “is a higher and better use” designated by the state.

What was the origin of the public lands system?

Originally the state set aside in each township public reserved lands – the legislative lot, the ministry lot, the minister lot, and the school lot. They were put in place to promote settlement, for the future benefit of that township. When a town incorporated they received those lots. In total the lots were somewhere between 1,000 and 1,280 acres per township. It seemed to change over time. If you look at a map of the public reserved lands you'll see they're clustered in the northern, western and downeast parts of the state. Townships incorporated in the southern part of the state and received their public lots. When the bureau was established in 1973 by the legislature the practice of towns receiving the lots changed and the decision made that what remained of the public lots would be retained for the general public as opposed to the specific benefit of folks within a township. 

Log yard on the Donnell Pond Unit. (Photo: Bureau of Parks and Lands)Didn't the state lose track of its public lots for some period?

In some cases ownership would be common and undivided, but not set out on the ground. Timber was being managed by timber management companies. The state had conveyed timber and grass rights management to private entities and the state did kind of lose track of that ownership interest over time. Eventually, when there was a renewed focus on that and an investigation, it was concluded – and there was some litigation involved – that what the state conveyed was the standing crop at the time, but not the timber rights in perpetuity. As a result of the court proceedings and the establishment of the Bureau of Public Lands in 1973 the state went through a process of trading and consolidating the public lots. That process had pretty much finished by the late 1980s.

Have parcels been added since then?

In terms of adding additional lands, the largest program has been the land for Maine's Future Program. The majority of the acreage acquired under that program was assigned to the bureau for management. Then you have the Forest Legacy Program in more recent years, with federal dollars, often being matched by the Land for Maine's Future program, that has led to some significant additions to the land base. In 1973 there were about 400,000 acres. Since then about 200,000 acres have been added.

The state's public reserved land system is managed for both recreation and timber. How does that work?

Our ownership objective, if you will, is established in Maine statutes. It is for multiple use management on a sustained yield basis. It is managing for wildlife, recreation and timber. That's somewhat different from most large forest landowners. From there we established an integrated resource policy. That determineshow we allocate acreage for certain typesof use. It's a dominant use concept. You look at the land base and identify resourcesthat are the most sensitive. In our hierarchy you have special protection at the top, then wildlife, underneath that is recreation, then underneath that, timber. The most sensitive use is one that, in order to maintain that resource, you can't have a lot of other activity going on. In many casesyou can have a secondary use. Wildlife, for instance. Say you designate an area as a deer wintering area. That doesn't mean you can't do timber management there. In fact, timber management is an important part of maintaining that continuous cover over time, but timber management will be subordinate. What we've ended up with is a little over 400,000 acresthat is timber dominant. Those are the acresthat we calculate our annual allowable cut. We do an inventory, which we just updated in 2011, do modeling to determinate growth rate and how much we can cut on an annual basis. Currently our allowable cut is 115,000 cords per year. In recent years we have been harvesting at that level. When we go through those management plans we identify recreational resources. To the extent that things are identified as remote recreation or backcountry recreation, that will influence the type of timber management that will or won't occur there. Included in the recreation consideration is visual zone management.

DoCanoeing on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. (Photo: Bureau of Parks and Lands)es the Maine Public Reserved Lands System have a sustainability certification?

We're dual certified, by the Forest Stewardship Council and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. We're in good standing with both of those. 

Talk a little about the bureau's timber management objectives.

We tend to grow trees on a longer rotation than many other landowners. And the majority of the acres are managed under multiple age classes rather than single age class. Our objective is to grow older, larger timber on a longer rotation with multiple age management. All that fits nicely when you have other objectives such as a recreation and wildlife. In addition our objective is to grow the highest value products -- sawlogs, veneer logs; older, larger material. A lot of our entries are stand improvement cuts, from a silvicultural as well as an ecological aspect, as far as increasing diversity. 

Where does the money from timber sales go? What is it used for?

We have a system here that is self-sustaining. The lands portion of the Bureau of Parks and Lands is a dedicated revenue program. We do not receive any general fund dollars. All revenue generated from reserved and non-reserved lands pays for not only the staff, but improvements such as road systems, campsites, wildlife habitat programs, trails, outhouses, picnic tables. That is one benefit that our “shareholders” – the public – receive. The other benefit is economic: employment for contractors that work on the lands, raw materials for the mills. Last year there were 35 operations ongoing, with material being marketed to 45 mills statewide.

Forest regrowth following timber harvesting on public reserved lands near Chamberlain Lake. (Photo: Bureau of Parks and Lands)How is timber on the public  lands sold?

The majority of the wood is bid on competitively. The exception is if there are special harvest requirements or we don't receive any bids. The standard approach is to put it out to bid as stumpage. More recently we have put more time and effort into contract logging. In the case of stumpage you ask what someone will pay to cut and remove marked trees. In contract logging you ask what someone will charge to cut that wood and either deliver it roadside or to a mill. Then we negotiate to sell the wood. We're optimistic that we will be able to improve the financial return by using contract logging more than we have in the past.

What kind of revenue does the bureau's timber management produce?

In calendar year 2011 our income was $4.6 million. Most of that would have come from timber, but there's almost $300,000 from leases of camp lots and another $800,000 or so from the lease of the dam on Flagstaff Lake. In 2012 we're projecting $3.7 million from timber.

How do the state park system and the public reserved lands system differ?

The mandate for the public reserved lands system is multiple use on a sustained yield basis, including timber management. The park system is designed to protect the natural resourcesand provide recreational opportunities. Timber management in parks is very limited. Recreational amenitieson the park system are developed; on the lands system they tend to be undeveloped. At a park you've got a paved parking lot, bathrooms with flush toilets, an onsite presence, often with interpretive programs. On the public lands you're going to find remote campsites and privies.

Are more outdoor recreationistsrealizing the opportunities available on the state's public lands?

The land for Maine's Future Program elevated the general public's awareness about the public lands. And I think there's a renewed interest in outdoor recreation, such as mountain biking, kayaking, and wildlife watching. Our planning process involvesmore of the public. And we have much better information available. We're putting out new guides and maps to the public lands. You can go to parksandlands.com, find the parcel you're interested in and print those brochures out at home.

What's your favorite parcel in the public lands system?

From a recreation viewpoint, the Cutler Coast parcel and the trail along what's called the Bold Coast is pretty spectacular. The trail along the high cliffs. I'm always intrigued by the high energy cobble beaches. The rocks are symmetrical because they get rolled up and down the beach by each incoming tide or wave. It's fascinating. I have some fond memories of outings on Nahmakanta– canoeing, camping, hiking the trails. In terms of timber there are some parcels like Scraggly Lake, where we have very old hemlock and sugar maple stands; hemlock that's 400 years old. I really marvel at 400-year-old trees.

What has changed about the management of the state's public lands over the years?

Management has been stable and consistent. What perhaps has changed is the level of information we

have. The planning process has become much more sophisticated and the peer review involved didn't exist in earlier years. We have dual certification now. We have a silviculturaladvisory committee that meets annually to look both at areas where we have some question about what to do and at areas we've visited previously. That committee is made up of representatives from a broad spectrum of individuals, environmental groups, academia, and forest managers both public and private.

How can A fall hike on the public lands. (Photo: Bureau of Parks and Lands)the public be involved in decision-making about the management of Maine's public lands?

The public has a number of opportunities to participate. Advisory Committees are, made up of interested individuals, with a cross section of interest and expertise, to assist with development of overall guiding policies and management plans for specific parcels. Once draft policies or plans have been developed, public meetings are held. Interested individuals should contact the Bureau to get on mailing lists to become involved or be notified of scheduled meetings.

Tell us a little bit about the ecological reserves, the special protection areas?

Ecological Reserves are designated areas containing representative native ecosystem types managed as special protection areas. These areas serve as benchmarks against which to measure changes in both managed and unmanaged ecosystems; provide habitat unlikely to occur in managed forests; and serve as sites for long-term scientific research, monitoring, and education. Currently there are 89,798 acres of ecologic reserves designated on Bureau managed public lands. The first round of baseline monitoring of these reserves is now complete.

Joe Rankin lives, writes and farms in New Sharon; he enjoys hiking and kayaking on the state's public reserved lands 

By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

Cathy Goslin vividly remembers a first grader visiting the re-created lumbering settlement of Leonard's Mills on a children's day not so long ago. The little girl parked herself by a woolly little lamb and stayed there. For hours.

“She didn't realize they were real animals. She thought they were just pictures in a book,” said Goslin, the executive director of the living history project in Bradley. “One of the things that keeps me going is when we have visitors come in and we assume they know what something is or what we're doing and they're just standing there in awe, like 'I never saw this before.' ”

Horses headed for the mill at Leonard's Mills. (Photo: Maine Forest and Logging Museum)You can tour the Maine Forest and Logging Museum at Leonard's Mills pretty much any time during the year, but on special days from April through October as many as 100 re-enactors and a similar number of supporting volunteers bring Leonard's Mills to life, tackling tasks common at the time – blacksmithing, spinning, running a water-powered sawmill, rowing a bateaux, taking care of livestock.

Located on 400 acres in Bradley, once the site of a real pioneer settlement on Blackman Stream, Leonard's Mills is one of the premier places to learn about the state's storied logging and lumbering history. It recreates a logging community of the 1790s, but also carries that history forward into the 1900's with a Lombard log hauler, a shingle mill, rotary sawmill, a machine shop and other exhibits from a later, more mechanized era of lumbering.Taking out bean hole beans at Leonard's Mills (Photo: Maine Forest & Logging Museum)

Goslin said the living history aspect of the project is key. “It gets visitors involved,” she said. “We purposely stay from those more static displays of collections and so forth. We want to show how those tools and other things were used.”

It's not surprising that Maine, the most heavily forested state in the nation and one with a long and rich history of forestry and lumbering, should also be rich in places where you can learn about that history, Maine's forest ecosystems, and modern logging and lumbering methods.

There are easily a dozen museums, arboretums, field days, nature trail systems, even a fall guided hiking program and an online tree club that aim to educate Mainers and others about the woods. On any given day through much of the year you can find something to do and much to learn at them.

They range from Leonard's Mills' living history format to the Maine State Museum's impressive exhibit on Maine's lumbering history. From Viles Arboretum's nature trails and groves of American chestnuts, conifers, ashes and larches to the Maine Tree Farm/SWOAM field day to the Forest Heritage Days celebration in Greenville.

Together they draw thousands upon thousands of people every year. Leonard's Mills alone sees some 7,000 visitors a year; 1,200 to 1,500 during its October living history weekend, said Goslin. Viles Arboretum, a 224-acre expanse of woods and fields in the heart of Maine's capital city, gets 15,000 visitors a year, said Executive Director Mark DesMeules.

American chestnut in flower at Viles Arboretum (Photo: Viles Arboretum)They come to Viles to visit the American chestnut grove, the ash or larch collections, the Space Shuttle Pines – planted from seeds that once traveled into space. To visit the huge old maple known as The General, paint watercolors of the pond, or watch birds. Plus, Viles with its numerous trail loops is a great place to go for a walk and clear the stale office air out of your lungs, as harried workers in nearby state office buildings know.

“Our collections are embedded in a matrix of native Maine forest of a variety of different types,” said DesMeules. “It's a great outdoor classroom. When a class says we want to learn about trees we can show them trees native to Maine. And, tell them, incidentally we have some trees from Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan trees are the ancestors of our apples. But the native trees and native ecology is a real big focus. We offer a lot of programs on native ecology. Because that's what the local schools want. And we're right here in their backyard.”

“It's a gateway introduction to what's out there in Maine. What I mean by that is a family can come here and learn about Maine forests and the roles of different trees and also learn about other places to go. But it's designed to show people, engage people and educate people about Maine and Maine forests.”

Viles is in the midst of makeover of sorts. They're redoing the visitor center lobby with mounts of Maine forest animals, including an impressive moose already in place. A new brochure is soon to be published. There's a full-color map coming, new interpretive signs are to be installed this summer, a new botanical labeling machine will soon be put into production, and new landscaping for the entrance is planned.

“We're going to have some amazing roll-outs this summer,” enthuses DesMeules, who said that the Arboretum improvements are designed to elevate it from being a local arboretum to a state destination.

Exhibits on the state's logging and lumbering heritage were among the first incorporated into the new Maine State Museum building across the Kennebec River from Viles Arboretum and are still hugely popular, said Museum Deputy Director Sheila McDonald.

The Lion. (Photo: Maine State Museum)Among them is a 1920 vintage gasoline-powered Lombard log hauler once used in the Allagash. It went on display in the early 1980s. Projected nearby are excerpts from the film “From Stump to Ship.” The museum expanded its logging and lumbering exhibit in 1986, adding an up-and-down sawmill, a circular saw mill built around 1900 and a clapboard saw. At the same time it added an 1846 Lion steam locomotive that worked for nearly fifty years as part of Washington County’s Whitneyville & Machias Railroad transporting tens of millions of board feet of lumber from mills to ships in Machiasport for shipment all over the world.Caulked river driver's boots. (Photo: Maine State Museum)

“The logging and lumbering exhibits are still very popular for visitors of all ages,” said McDonald. “The Lombard and Lion, particularly, are large and dramatic. Many older visitors remember the Lombard and its connections to Maine inventor Alvin Lombard of Waterville.”

Complementing the big ticket items, however, are the more mundane and personal: a pair of caulked boots, chain saws, peaveys, cant dogs, Emerson and Stevens axes, and many historical photographs. Visitors, of which the Museum sees 50,000 a year, “easily relate to these objects, which have such an important, personal dimension,” she said.

The L.C. Bates Museum of Natural History at the Goodwill-Hinckley School in Fairfield houses a fascinating and eclectic collection in the style of a 19^th century museum.

In the mammal and bird rooms, beautiful dioramas by American impressionist painter Charles Hubbard combine with period taxidermy mounts to show native species and their habitats. Outside, eight miles of nature trails wind through the campus' woods and fields.

The museum tries to uses the exhibits, collections and programs to promote an understanding of our Maine habitat, its preservation and stewardship,” said Director Deborah Staber. “Behind the museum are the nature trails. It's an indoor-outdoor experience when you come here.”

Wildlife habitat diorama at L.C. Bates Museum. (Photo: L.C. Bates Museum)The diormas are unique because they're in the impressionistic style, Staber said. One of the largest “shows Caratunk and Pleasant Pond, with bears; the caribou, now extinct in Maine; and the white-tailed deer. The dioramas depict a real variety of animals and birds from the smallest chipmunks and mice to moose and things like that.”

The bird diormas are also interactive: they offer visitors the chance to hear, by pressing a button, the call of each bird. L.C. Bates runs spring nature walks and three-hour bird programs for children and groups that include such things as dissecting owl pellets and handling feathers. The museum is also doing its bit to educate people about invasive species, with its Asian long-horned beetle exhibit.

Kevin Doran, a natural science educator with the Maine Forest Service, said Mainers have a significant number of opportunities to educate themselves about the forest and the role it has played in the state over the past four centuries.

Most stress “the historical aspect and importance that forests have played in Maine on many different levels,” Doran said. “If the displays are from a teaching standpoint, a teacher could take some of the connections from there and talk about the history or what was happening culturally at that time. If you go to a logging museum and they're showing a newsreel about the log drives you're going to look at the Kennebec River differently when you're out there.”

And what's most important, he emphasized, is to take it “out there,” into the community forests, the school forests, the state parks, Baxter State Park; into wildlife refuges and the trails of the state's public reserved lands. To take what you learn into the woods.

Connecting with the natural world at the L.C. Bates Museum. (Photo: L.C. Bates Museum)“We have 18 million acres of trees in this state. To have access to that much woods is really unique. We always stress the opportunity for kids and adults to get outside. The real connection, the emotional connection is made when you're out there. I don't want to diminish being inside or learning things online, but nothing is like being out there,” Doran said.

Some more places to learn about the Maine forest:

Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum. On State Route 16 in Rangeley, is open Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. from late June to early September. On exhibit are hundreds of logging artifacts, including snubbing machines, a collection of crosscut and chainsaws, a forerunner of the skidder, and one of the last of the bateaux used on the Dead River log drives. The museum also includes art by western Maine lumbermen, including “fan towers,” miniature wood carvings, chainsaw carvings and oil paintings. There is also a two-day Logging Festival Days celebration in Rangeley the last full weekend in July.

Patten Lumbermen's Museum. On the Shin Pond Road in Patten, it preserves the record of pre-World War II lumbering in the North Maine Woods. Nine buildings house such things as a Lombard log hauler, Holt tractors, vintage logging tools, and models and dioramas that give you a sense of the lumbering camps and activities of yore.

Processing logs from the northern forests helped build the Penobscot River town of Old Town, and exhibits on the logging and lumbering industry are among the permanent exhibits at the Old Town Museum, located at 353 Main Street. 
 

The gardens at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden in Boothbay offer a stunning destination for gardeners, but several of the Garden's trails wend through native coastal forest. The Garden offers courses in planting with native plants and native plant ecology, as well as a certificate program in native plants and ecological horticulture.

Huckleberry Cove Trail at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. (Photo: William Cullina, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens)Greenville's Forest Heritage Days has been held since 1991 and this year runs from Aug. 10-12. The festival celebrates Maine's “working forest” and includes bus tours of woodlots, demonstrations by the Colby College Woodsmen, and the Game of Logging, where certified professional loggers battle it out in events such as the “bore cut,” saw chain filing, and precision felling.

Maine Tree Farm/SWOAM Field Day will be held Sept. 8 at the Bethel tree farm of Ernest and Alberta Angevine, the state's 2012 Outstanding Tree Farmers. The day includes woodlot tours and talks and demonstrations on a variety of forestry-related topics.

The 4,200-acre Penobscot Experimental Forest in Bradley and Eddington is a research laboratory for scientists and forestry experts, but the average person with an interest in forest management can learn a lot there about how different management techniques play out over time.

Massabesic Experimental Forest in Alfred and Lyman covers 3,600 acres. It too is a center for long-term forestry research, but has several miles of trails through different forest ecosystems.

Guided Fall Foliage Outings. The Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands and the Maine Forest Service offer a series of guided hikes, rides and paddles during the fall foliage season. All trips are family friendly and park rangers and professional foresters explain the wonders of the color change.

Gilsland Farm is a 65-acre sanctuary on the Presumpscot Estuary and the headquarters of Maine Audubon. There is a modern environmental center and trails wind through fields, wetlands and forest. Programs are offered year round.

Maine Tree Club is designed to teach people about trees, forest ecosystems, and the value of the forest. Participants register online. They learn about 50 tree species over two years through two “tree fact sheets” each month and outings that cover things such as tree identification, pruning, forest pests, and forest ecosystems.

Joe Rankin lives in New Sharon with his wife, Mary, and their three dogs. He keeps 50 hives of bees, does market gardening and writes on forestry topics.

By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future writer

You're driving down a Maine highway, following a logging truck that's teetering and swaying with a load of logs, belching diesel fumes, and, because your cell phone fell down between the seats, you have time to speculate about where those logs might be going.

A paper mill? Small sawmill? Big sawmill? The log yard 20 miles ahead? Your mind is rolling over the possibilities when you see a loaded logging truck headed in the opposite direction.

No, it does not make sense. In fact there was a comic who had a routine about that very thing. He always got a laugh.

The two trucks are part of the “flow” of Maine wood. But even calling it a “flow” implies a sort of riverine uni-directionality at odds with reality. A better word might be “churning.” Like its big sister, capitalism, the flow of wood in Maine is seemingly chaotic, self-organizing, yet constantly changing.

Verso Paper Mill in Jay. (Photo: The Rankin File)About 90 percent of Maine is forested, the highest percentage of any state, and huge chunks of the northern part of the state are pretty much contiguous forest, where there is little development except for gravel logging roads. The state's abundant forests have been a mainstay of its economy since European settlers came here. Today Maine has more forest than a century ago.

Some 500,000 acres a year are harvested, give or take – pines, spruce, fir, maple, beech, birch, hemlock, oak, aspen, larch. In 2010 that came down to: 14.6 million green tons, according to the Maine Forest Service's 2010 Wood Processor report, the final word on such things. But the state's forest products industry processed 15.4 million green tons of wood.

It ends up that Maine is actually a net importer of wood. Mull that over. The most forested state in the nation imports a lot of wood.

So, how does wood move through the state, into and out of Maine? And why?

“There are all these little stories about why wood flows the way it flows. There is a lot of common sense to it if you can drill down enough to take a look at it. It's economics . . . to a large degree it's market driven.”” said Kenneth M. Laustsen, the state Forest Service's biometrician. He's the agency's chief number cruncher, creating charts, graphs and spreadsheets on everything from acres harvested to harvest volumes.

In other words, it's what's in demand, where the wood is cut, what local prices are versus prices elsewhere in the region, the country and around the globe. In addition it's where the mills are located. Where the roads go. It's geography. It's weather. It's fuel prices. It's the value of the product. It's often China, if not the butterfly flapping its wings in China. It's currency exchange rates. And, of course, the health of the national and global economy.

To a certain extent trying to make sense of the big picture is a headache waiting to happen. It's much easier to look at it on a smaller scale, said Lloyd Irland, a forest economist and president of The Irland Group, because “it's different for each category of wood.”

A look at the flow in some sectors:

• Hardwood sawlogs. There are few hardwood sawlogs sawn in Maine. Most go out of state. Top quality logs travel overseas, where they're peeled into sheets of veneer as thin as a paper clip. Maine lost many hardwood sawmills when the furniture industry moved out in search of cheap labor and the dowel mills and turneries closed in the face of cheap imports. Pallet makers, who use lower quality sawlogs, are struggling because there isn't enough industry left in the northeast that uses pallets, said Irland.

• Softwood sawlogs: Maine harvested 618 million board feet of softwood sawlogs in 2010 and sent 181 million of that out of state for processing, while importing another 57 million. Most of the raw softwood logs that leave Maine go to Quebec, where border mills are ideally located near the vast forests that produce the logs. However, the strong Canadian dollar has made it more difficult for those mills to compete and some have gone under.
• Biomass: Once a waste product bark and sawdust today are a resource, used, along with virgin wood chips and chipped construction and demolition debris, to fuel electric generating stations. Maine has quite a few of these, the rest of the New England states few to none. Because of this Maine imports a lot of biomass chips. Ironically, much of the electricity produced is sold to states like Connecticut and Massachusetts as “green” or renewable power.

• Pellets and firewood: Firewood use goes up and down with the price of other fuels. With fossil fuel prices up, firewood is more popular than ever. Pellets, originally a way to use waste from hardwood flooring, blossomed into a sector that grew to use virgin wood as well. Maine's forest products industry processed some 206,000 green tons of firewood and pellets in 2010, only slightly less than the state produced.

• Pulpwood: Maine has fewer paper mills than a few years ago, but the ones still here need raw materials. Maine is a net importer of softwood and hardwood pulpwood, with some coming from as far away as the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, said Laustsen. It used to be that softwood pulpwood was king. Now Maine paper mills use twice the amount of hardwood pulp as softwood pulp.

Periodically, Maine's shipping of raw wood to other states and countries surfaces as a political issue.

A log concentration yard in Central Maine. (Photo: The Rankin File)Folks in the forest products industry still remember former Gov. Angus King saying that no tree should leave Maine with its bark on. It was a memorable quote, but . . .

“Given the international context, given we're not an island, total self sufficiency, processing every stick here is not possible,” said Irland. “We depend on shipping a lot of our product somewhere else. A lot of the debate about us shipping wood out ignores the fact that we depend on a lot of wood coming in.”

In fact, say the experts, Maine does pretty well at getting value out of wood.

“Maine has the capacity to take single stick of wood and send it to a number different places. We have sawmills, pulp mills, pellet mills, biomass plants,” said Laustsen. “There's a lot of internal state demand for wood products.”

And that internal demand explains the seemingly counter-intuitive situation of logging trucks passing in the night loaded with seemingly identical types of logs.

“These mills are always jockeying to find the cheapest raw material,” said Laustsen. They say, 'so why should I fight with a mill 20 miles away when I can go 20 miles the other way and get wood out of New Hampshire. There's always that tension. “

When it comes to creating competitive tension, Irland notes that Maine's paper industry “is competing with itself” for raw material, since many paper mill co-generation plants are burning the same sorts of chips to produce power that the mill's pulp mill is cooking into paper fibers.

“The markets used to be neat and segmented. But not anymore. Which is why you can't tell from looking at a load of wood where it's going,” said Irland.

Maine wood imports and exports 1990 to 2010 (Chart: Maine Forest Service 2010 Wood Processor Report)You'd think that diesel prices might be a big factor governing how far it's worth hauling sawlogs, or chips, or pulpwood. But it's not that simple.

“A lot of people are hauling wood 100, 120 miles and hardly batting and eyelash anymore. And hauling it right past the woodyards of other people who are buying the identical product. And this is true of the lowest value product, topwood that's been chipped for biomass. We used to say it was the high value stuff that was hauled long distances. Today even the lowest value stuff is going long distances,” said Irland.

Some of that is due to haul-back arrangements that allow a trucker to drive loaded in both directions, said Laustsen.

While it's true that Maine still does a fairly good job processing the tremendous quantities of wood it produces and imports, it's also true that profound changes in the global economy over the last 30 years have led to a massive shift in products and the loss of some markets.

“There are fewer sawmills and fewer paper mills. The ones remaining are quite strong. They're the survivors. Nonetheless, whenever you lose a mill you are losing some demand, which, in the long run could adversely impact landowners who would like to have people competing for wood and keeping the prices at a good level,” said Earle D. “Chip” Bessey, the president of E.D. Bessey & Son, a Hinckley-based buyer and seller of logs and a man who's been involved in the log trade for more than three decades.

Bessey witnessed the closure of Ethan Allan and Bethel Furniture Stock and other furniture manufacturers and the loss of the state's dowel mills, which he said reduced demand for white birch.

“The new markets are biomass, fuel chips, pellets. All these things are low value items. It's nice to have a market for low value material. But we always thought pulpwood was a low grade material. This is several steps below pulpwood in value to the landowner. As a landowner I'm concerned as we lose the opportunity for adding value on the high end because it means the overall value of the timber we produce is lower.”

The lesson for forestland owners, Bessey said, is never to assume that the value of your trees will go up.

“If you own enough woodland to worry about I'd just keep up with it,” he said. “If there is something that is mature or dying or decaying I'd keep it moved. It's like housing. People thought the value of houses would never go down. The value of wood may remain steady, it may not.”

Joe Rankin writes, works his woodlot, keeps 50 hives of honeybees and does market gardening in New Sharon. 

By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future writer

Earlier this month state conservation officials gathered in the Hall of Flags at the Maine State House to accept a land donation from Huber Resources Corp., one of the state's major landowners.

Not just any donation, but a 143-acre parcel on Katahdin Lake with a stunning view of the state's tallest mountain; one of the last, and the larger, of only two in-holdings in Maine's iconic wilderness park.

Over the previous few weeks it seems you couldn't scan the headlines without reading about a successful land conservation initiative: purchase of land on Ragged Mountain in Camden, wetlands in York, 27 acres of riverfront in Cushing, an easement on 200 acres of farm and woodland in South Paris.

In December Lyme Timber Co. announced it was buying 3,200 acres of forestland on the Schoodic Peninsula next to Acadia National Park and would work with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and Friends of Acadia to protect part of the land through conservation easements.

The past few years have been tough economically, no doubt about it. But, land conservation efforts are alive, well and flourishing in spite of the tight economy, and Maine seems to be leading the way.

Huber Resources Katahdin Lake lot includes a sand beach and marvelous views of Maine's highest peak. (Photo: Huber Resources)Every five years the Land Trust Alliance does a census of land conservation efforts in the U.S. Its latest, released last year, looked at the years from 2005 through 2010, a period that overlapped the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble and the global financial meltdown that came on its heels and siphoned trillions of dollars in wealth from the U.S. economy and put millions out of work.

The trust found that:  

• During those five years acreage conserved by U.S. land trusts went up by 10 million acres and was up by 23 million acres over the year 2000

• Land trusts had conserved more than 47 million acres in total, twice the size of all the national parks in the U.S.

• In Maine 88 land trusts had conserved just shy of 1.8 million acres, second only to the 2.3 million conserved in California and tops in the northeast.

The report noted that “land trusts are making these everyday miracles despite the recession and big cuts to government funding,” adding that land trusts nationwide have protected more land and in every region and have more people involved in conservation efforts.

“Overall, land conservation is one of those causes or objectives or goals that Maine folks just have a long-term commitment to,” said Tim Glidden, the executive director of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, one of the state's largest land trusts and one which also acts as a mentor to smaller trusts throughout the state. In all there are nearly 90 working in Maine. “Both landowners and the general public view it as a good thing for Maine. It may cycle up or down, but they view it as valuable and keep doing it, even when it's a little tougher.”

MCHT conserved some 2,300 acres last year, said Glidden, including five coastal islands.

Highlights included protecting a 500-acre block of undeveloped forest on Mt. Desert Island and adding a new 100-acre preserve on the shores of Cobscook Bay in Pembroke. In addition, MCHT helped Lyme Timber Co. in their purchase of the Schoodic forestland that had been considered for development. Lyme intends to conserve key parts of the 3,200-acre parcel.

Alan Hutchinson, executive director of the Forest Society of Maine, said it's gratifying that in a down economy “the interest in land conservation has held strong, from the perspective of landowners valuing undeveloped property and wanting to keep it that way and in regard to landowner interest in seeking conservation opportunities through easements and donations and in some cases sales.”

The Forest Society is the major player in land conservation in Maine's North Woods.

One of the organization's big projects was the Amherst Community Forest, a project that came together in 2010 to protect nearly 5,000 acres around six ponds north of Route 9. Last year the Society closed on conservation easements totaling around 10,000 acres, with “most of those donated easements or that had a donated component,” he said.

One interesting thing, both men said, is how many people still want to own land. Example: billionaire John Malone, whose purchases of large chunks of Maine forestland helped him nudge aside Ted Turner for title of top land baron in the U.S.

“Undeveloped land, for the resources it contains, for forestry, farming, wildlife, whatever it might be, is something that's valued by people and they want to own it,” said Hutchinson.

The dilemma most are up against “is that the value of undeveloped land didn't diminish during the real estate bust. The bubble burst around developed land, but not around undeveloped land. In fact, in some cases it went up slightly.”

One factor in that seeming paradox, Hutchinson said, is that while undeveloped land used to be valued for the timber or other resources that were on it, these days its potential for development is often factored into the price.

“If you own property or want to buy property and then keep it as either forestland or farm it's tougher to do today than ever,” said Hutchinson.

Note the rate of land conservation in the northeast compared to other regions in this graphic from The Land Trust Alliance's latest census.While a tough economy does prompt some owners who need cash to sell, making tracts available that otherwise might not have been, it has also made it harder for land conservation organizations to come up with the money to buy it, said Glidden.

“At the end of the day, if you have to pay for the land, even if it's available at a good price, you have to have the money. So fund raising is definitely more challenging,” he said.

There is some federal funding available for land conservation projects. But the Land for Maine's Future Program, which helped conserve more than half a million acres since 1987, has allocated the last of its bond funds and has no immediate hope of a substantial new infusion of cash.

One thing that will be more and more important in future of the land conservation efforts is partnerships, said Glidden: Partnerships between large and small land trusts, land trusts and the state, land trusts and municipalities, land trusts and landowners. “I think you'll see that those partnerships will be increasingly locally grounded. They have been for years,” he said.

Perhaps the breadth, and depth, of the land conservation movement these days, as well as the groundswell in partnership building, is best illustrated in the Keeping Maine's Forests Initiative. This mega-partnership includes some 28 members, ranging from forest landowners to environmental advocacy organizations and includes all the major players in forestland conservation, such as The Nature Conservancy, the Forest Society of Maine and the Trust for Public Land. Its goals are to support stewardship on working forest land through such as maintaining and restoring native fish habitat and to support conservation easements with willing landowners on working forestland.

Glidden notes that land conservation deals don't happen overnight. Many are the result of years of talking, and listening, to landowners. Building a relationship.

Many of the landowners who work with conservationists or the state on deals have done so before.

Huber, the donor of the Katahdin Lake parcel known as the Keep Lot, has a history of donations, including the 4,000-acre Crystal Bog Preserve in the towns of Crystal and Sherman; more than 600 acres near Patten, including land along the Seboeis River at Seboeis Gorge; and a 1991 gift of 265 acres of wetlands called Marble Fen, home to diverse vegetation and rare plant species.

Kittredge Brook on Mt. Desert Island, one of Maine Coast Heritage Trust's 2011 successes. (Photo: MCHT)Lyme Timber Co. specializes in managing lands with “unique conservation values.” It has been a partner in many conservation land deals in Maine and other states, including the ongoing West Grand Lake initiative in downeast Maine and the Amherst Community Forest project, as well as the Schoodic purchase.

Both Glidden and Hutchinson predict that land conservation activity in the state will continue to hold strong, despite the overall economy, fund raising challenges, and the rise in land values.

“I would expect to see steady continued, exciting good conservation projects that meet community needs. I think that's going to continue for some time,” said Glidden. “Despite the success we've had, there is still a lot of need for land conservation to occur. And as a complement to that, there's also going to be more engagement with communities beyond the deal, on stewardship of the land and making it accessible to the public.”

Land trusts are exploring ways to engage more with their host communities, he said. MCHT, for instance, is looking at converting some of its lands in downeast Maine to organic blueberry production, trying to help boost the economy.

“I expect to see more of that type of thing,” Glidden said. “The real metrics of success are how conserved land becomes becomes an integral part of people's lives in these communities; provides benefit to their lives in ways that people see and value directly.”

Hikers ascend Number 5 Mountain near Jackman. The Forest Society of Maine holds a 10,000-acre easement on Nature Conservancy land as an ecological reserve. (Photo: Forest Society of Maine)The conservation easement has been a major tool used to ensure that forest land continues to produce lumber and pulp, helping feed local economies and create jobs while protecting the land from development or further subdivision.

The Forest Society's Hutchinson said Maine “has done a remarkable job figuring out how to approach conservation in a way that also builds economic vitality though this incredibly good balance of approaches we've taken, including easements on private working lands, whether it's farms or forests.”

It has meant developing partnerships with some new players. Maine paper companies are out of the landowning business. New forestland owners have tended to be financial investors such as real estate investment trusts and a new class of individuals that a trio of Yale University researchers in a 2010 report on 25 years of North Woods lands sales labeled the “new land barons,” some of whom have a sincere interest in land conservation.

“It's a tremendous time of transition,” said the Forest Society's Hutchinson. “I think everybody in Maine believes that it's important to try to hold on to the bulk of the great north woods in the state while allowing growth to occur around communities. And there's a growing awareness in society overall and in the conservation world of the importance of a strong forest products industry in the state to help ensure that these lands stay undeveloped and sustained as forest lands.”

Forests for Maine's Future writer Joe Rankin lives in New Sharon, where, in addition to writing on forest topics, he tends his woodlot, keeps 50 hives of honeybees, and does market gardening.

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By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

Watching the edger-optimizer at Robbins Lumber Co.'s pine mill in Searsmont induces, first, a gee whiz reaction at the sheer, well, efficiency of it, followed by a sort of hypnotic state.

Whoosh . . . a board or boards shoots out of the center, the guides shifting position to accommodate them, while the trimmed edges shoot off to the sides, dropping a level to a conveyor that leads to the chipper.

Whoosh . . . whoosh . . . whoosh. The boards keep coming, and going. On to the trimmer. The edger's rhythm is almost metronomic. Kind of spooky, since the machine seems to be running itself.

An automatic stacker in operation at Robbins Lumber Co. (Photo: The Rankin File)Welcome to the sawmill of the 21^st century: a high tech uber machine. A virtual organism of efficiency and automation. These days computers, conveyors, scanners, lasers, digital cameras, and bar coding systems do most of the work. The saws are flexible bandsaws. There are employees, but they seem to be here mainly to double check the computers and intervene if there's a problem.

It's a far cry from the primitive sawmills of settlement times, or even the circular sawmills common only a few decades ago.

And all this technology is directed at one end: efficiency, says the Robbins mill's Sawmill Manager Jeffrey D. Caswell, as he leads the way up and down and through the levels of the 130-year-old company's cavernous and sprawling mill, a mill that saws 28 million board feet of pine a year as well as tons and tons of byproducts such as bark, sawdust and shavings.

“It's all about having less sawdust and chips out out the door and more lumber go out the door,” said Caswell.

“These days virtually every task that happens in a sawmill has something of technology about it,” said Lloyd Irland of Wayne, a forest economist and the president of The Irland Group, “and frequently it's pretty high end stuff. It's just amazing computerization, process controls and tracking, quality control, inventory control. And that's not even talking about all the computerization and sophistication that controls the machines themselves.”

Of course, technology has wormed its way into every manufacturing process in almost every corner of the globe, making it faster and cheaper to make almost anything.

But, said Irland, “the lumber business is a special case. If you think about it, the end product is a pretty low tech product – a 2 by 4 or a 2 by 8 16 feet long, say. That's pretty basic. But it just takes a lot of high tech to manufacture it.”

The computers are only one of the sophisticated technologies that make the modern sawmill possible, Irland points out. There are also things like “really capable metals” for planing, saws and chippers; hydraulics to operate machinery and do the heavy lifting, especially the head rig; sensing technologies to run a drying kiln; moisture meters; metal detectors that tell if a log is hiding a blade-ruining nail, horseshoe or twist of barbed wire.

A cant, a log sawn flat on two sides, heads into a 10-inch gang saw at Pleasant RIver Lumber Co.'s mill. (Photo courtesy of Pleasant River Lumber Co.)And, if you're taking a tour of a modern sawmill, you might not even see much of this stuff. “Metal detectors. That's something you don't really notice when you tour a sawmill,” said Irland. “It's probably just a big box somewhere. That is probably not really high tech, either, but it's high tech compared to 50 years ago. And it's an additional item of what technology allows you to do.”

At Robbins Lumber, and most other large sawmills, lasers, working in tandem with a computer, scan a debarked log and turn it in the head rig so it's optimally placed to yield the most lumber, as shown in a graphic on a computer screen. Then the log, dogged in the carriage, zips back and forth through a double-edge broad-blade bandsaw, boards falling to the side to be carried away down the line. The log is flipped up, down and around in the rig until it's squared up, then sent on its way to a re-saw station, where more saws turn the rest of it into boards.

“It's like a big video game,” said Caswell of the head-rig operator. “The guy running it has two joysticks, each with five or six thumb buttons, each with a grip trigger, and two foot pedals. Now, when I'm looking for someone to run it, you get a good video gamer, they'll master that in a week.”

For sawmills, the technological revolution has been accelerating for more than three decades, said Jason Brochu, vice president and owner of Pleasant River Lumber Co. in Dover-Foxcroft, which produces tens of millions of board feet of pine boards and framing lumber at its three sites.

“It started with major mechanical improvements that created efficiencies by eliminating positions and replacing them with equipment,” Brochu said.

Now “it's more focused on information technology and using it to improve yields. The amount of production per person has improved dramatically throughout the years as this technology has been implemented. Some of the ideas had been around for years. But only in the last 10 years or so have the computers become fast enough to handle the ideas.”

Sometimes, no matter how familiar you are with a modern sawmill, it's hard not to be impressed.

Irland remembers touring a mill in British Columbia a few years ago.

“There was a big log sorter, a long narrow conveyor. An automatic detector told the chop saw where to cut and then the pieces were different lengths. What amazed me about this damn machine was, I went over there to look at it, and there was nobody watching it. It was totally automated. There was a guy in a blue technician's smock who wasn't paying any attention to it. His head was buried in a big box of wires. It's a wonderful image.”

That technology, which marries high speed digital cameras, computers and saws to saw, trim, sort, and grade boards is today in use at Robbins Lumber, Pleasant River Lumber and most other big Maine mills. And it is impressive in action.

Brochu said he still finds it fascinating. He said the so-called “vision optimization” technology in use at Pleasant River can scan boards at a rate of one a second. “We have had this technology since 2008 and it has resulted in a number of efficiencies for our company.”

However, some of the advances in productivity have come from simply repurposing technologies in use in other industries. Bar coding, for instance. Caswell said Robbins sticks bar code labels on stacks of rough lumber headed into the drying kiln and relabels stacks after the lumber is planed. The codes spell out the contents of each stack. “We know what lumber is in the process of drying, what lumber is finished drying, and what has been sold,” he said. “Just this year we started bar coding loads of logs so we can keep better track of inventory.”

Of course, all this technology doesn't come cheap. Maine mills, as well as their counterparts all across the U.S. and Canada, have spent big bucks on new equipment and the buildings to house it over the past couple of decades.

Robbins Lumber's latest big project, in 2005, was an $8 million addition to its mill building and the new trimming, sorting and stacking machinery to fill it, said Caswell.

Pleasant River has invested $14 million since 2004, said Brochu.

A log heads into an optimizer at Pleasant River Lumber, where it will be scanned and optimally positioned for sawing. The purpose: to get the maximum amount of lumber out of the log. (Photo Courtesy Pleasant River Lumber Co.)The company's ongoing projects include installation of a high-tech optimized slashing system that cuts trees into log length, and a large fixed mount crane. That $3 million project will improve accuracy and efficiency in the log yard and mill, he said. Pleasant River is also installing optimization equipment at a pine mill the company bought just this year, as well as a new high efficiency dry kiln and a sawdust fired boiler.

The results of all this investment: mills that can get more lumber from each log, use smaller logs, produce lumber faster with far fewer employee injuries. And fewer employees period.

A sorter at Robbins Lumber's mill scans finished boards and drops them into bins before they head on to the stacker. (Photo: The Rankin File)Yes, modern sawmills employ fewer people. A lot fewer than they did not so long ago.

The Maine Future Forest Economy Project's 2005 report on Current Conditions and Factors Influencing the Future of Maine's Forest Products Industry noted that Maine sawmill employment fell from 2,369 in 1997 to 1,786 five years later. But, and this is a big but . . . “Maine mills have become noticeably more productive per employee,” boosting annual output per worker by 13 percent in the five years preceding 2002, the report said. It added that “This . . . is likely the net effect of capital investments made during the late 1990s.”

Experts say that technological investment by Maine sawmills has led to a far safer workplace, and jobs that pay better.

“You don't have the injuries and deaths in logging and the sawmills that you did. Because so much equipment is doing that work now,” said Irland.

Bar coding keeps track of inventory. This label is going on a stack of rough lumber heading into the drying kiln at Robbins Lumber Co. in Searsmont. (Photo: The Rankin File)“Communities have fewer jobs but they're better paying jobs,” he added. “The way to look at it in these kinds of industries, where the competition, both globally and domestically is just cutthroat, is that the choice is not between a hundred jobs and 80 jobs, the choice is between 80 jobs and zero. If we didn't get more productive and trim back to 80 we'd go out of business entirely.”

Researchers on the Maine Future Forest Economy Project put it this way six years ago: “While capital investment may lead to loss of some jobs, it is a key component of the future success of Maine's sawmill sector,” leading to increased output, more efficiency, or even new products.

“Maine has comparatively high electricity and labor costs, and one way that mills can control these costs is through the use of technology,” the report's authors noted. “In order for Maine mills to be competitive in the global marketplace, mills will need to use technology to control costs and be as efficient and productive as possible.”

Or, as Caswell bluntly puts it: “The sawmills that don't embrace the technology aren't going to be around in 10 years.”

A strapping and wrapping machine in operation at Pleasant River Lumber Co. (Photo Courtesy of Pleasant River Lumber Co.)Which begs the question: isn't there are technology plateau looming not so far off, where the costs will outweigh the gains in efficiency?

“Not a chance,” said Pleasant River's Brochu.

“Our industry has had an incredible history of using technology to create efficiencies. Even in today's global economy the work is continuing. As the economy improves it will accelerate. A very short time ago image optimization was a dream. Now it is not only commonplace, it is becoming more economical and mills can start expanding its use into other aspects of their operation.

“The same thing will happen with something like x-ray technology. There is a tremendous advantage to being able to see inside a log before opening it up. This advantage is great enough for equipment companies to spend a lot of R&D money to figure it out. I expect a lot of progress to be made in this area as the economy improves and R&D budgets increase.”

Forests for Maine's Future writer Joe Rankin lives, farms and works his woodlot in New Sharon, where his modest dreams of owning a high tech sawmill feature a used Woodmizer.

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

As a young boy in the 1940s Richard Nadeau frequently spent time in the remote lumber camps of northwestern Maine with his dad, who worked as a crew boss.

While the men cut and limbed trees, Nadeau saw the deep woods, the towering spruce and fir, the mossy rocks, as a playground.

“I would sit motionless on a log for hours, watching animals. One of the most enjoyable moments was observing a deer killed by a bobcat, which fed on the carcass for as long as I could stay still,” he remembered. He watched squirrels, grouse, and marten. “I think that as a boy I observed every species in Maine.”

A few years later his dad moved the family from Stratton to Auburn, where his parents could more easily find employment, and Nadeau became a city kid. He went on to college and became a rehabilitation counselor and vocational expert working with developmentally disabled people. But he never lost his sense of wonder at the woods.

When Nadeau retired he moved back to Stratton in 1995. He bought an old building with the vague idea of starting a business. “I knew that starting a business in Stratton would not succeed unless I had an outside market. When the Internet took hold, I knew what business I was to go into,” he said.

Today he operates naturallist.com, aptly subtitled “Forest foragers for your natural and wild foods, herbs and arts and crafts materials.” Nadeau sells everything from spruce gum to beaver teeth, moss to moose “nuggets.” He sells birch bark; black bear “oil;” spruce, fir and pine cones' fiddleheads; mushrooms.

Forest economists would call Nadeau's inventory “non-timber forest products,” generally shortened to NTFPs.

It's a catchall term that includes pretty much everything that isn't logs felled for timber and pulp.

Dave Fuller shows off an exquisitely crafted folded birch bark basket made by former Penobscot Governor Barry Dana. (Photo: The Rankin File)That includes such prominent products as maple syrup, fiddleheads, and conifer wreaths. Though some people include blueberries in that mix, others argue blueberries don't grow in forests and, since they're managed as an agricultural product would be, should be considered a field crop.

 NTFPs include a huge variety of natural objects ­- seeds, cones, boughs, berries, fungi, plants, bark, saplings -- with utilitarian, decorative, or medicinal uses. They're made into hiking staffs and canes, baskets, decorative wreaths, carvings or turnings, balsam fir pillows, dyes, jams and jellies, tinctures and salves. The list goes on and on.

 And, as your geographic perspective shifts, so does what's on the list. In the south, kudzu, the vine that smothers utility poles, is considered a non-timber forest product. Elsewhere in the world, from Nepal to Brazil to central Africa, people are trying to capitalize on the non-timber forest products in their forest as a way of retaining control of their lands and keeping it as forest.

 Dave Fuller is the University of Maine Cooperative Extension expert on non-timber forest products. He admits that no one has a good handle on what such non-timber products are worth to the Maine economy.

Maple syrup alone is a $13 million business in Maine. Holiday wreaths are huge too, with big and well known players such as downeast Maine's Worcester Wreath Co., which touts itself as the only wreath company to manage its own forest -- 4,000 acres of balsam. But Worcester and Maine's other big wreath producers have competitors in small family wreath operations across the state. No one can say how much Maine wreaths are worth, as a sector of the forest products economy. Fuller guesses it's $10 million, but quickly adds “that's probably low.”

 In a 2010 study of non-timber forest products use by residents of the St. John Valley in northern Maine, a trio of researchers from the University of Vermont and the U.S. Forest Service concluded that non-timber forest products “make substantial contributions to the economic viability and cultural vitality of northern forest communities.” In that study, titled Culturally and Economically Important Nontimber Forest Products of Northern Maine, they estimated that northern Mainers used some 120 items from the woods and “established NTFP commodities including maple syrup and conifer wreaths contribute more than $50 million to the northern forest economy annually.”

Getting a handle on the numbers statewide, much less across northern New England region or the northern forest region, is so hard because most non-timber forest products aren't collected on anything even approaching an industrial scale. In fact, most are part of what could be considered an underground economy, but one that provides part-time or seasonal employment for thousands and a supplementary income for rural Mainers who often desperately need it.

“It's often a cash economy. It's appealing to folks because there are low start-up costs associated with it. Which is a great thing. We frequently champion the cause of small business people. But this is even smaller than that,” Fuller said.

Mainers are out there harvesting wreath tips or cones or saplings for hiking staffs; while others are creating, carving and crafting on their kitchen tables. No telling how many people are involved in this below-the-radar part of the economy, but Fuller guesses it's a lot. And he says it does have the potential to grow, especially with the internet as a marketing tool.

 Fiddleheads, the forest fruit of spring. (Photo: U.S. Forest Service)The researchers who studied non-timber forest product use in the St. John Valley said most of the people they interviewed sold non-timber forest products to supplement other income, but some rely on it for a living. In addition, many, including many native Americans, trade what they collect or make for other goods, they found.

Native Americans deserve credit for developing uses for many items from the forests around them. They were the first to make maple syrup, of course. They crafted, and still craft, exquisite canoes of birch bark and are famous for brown ash baskets. And they traded their crafts to whites for items such as pots and other metal goods.

In Maine, Fuller said, the Shakers were among the first to try to turn forest arts and crafts into a real moneymaker. Because there were so few tourists coming to Maine in the 1850s, Shakers from the religious sect's communities in southern Maine would take their wares, such as poplar baskets and balsam pillows, to Massachusetts to sell, Fuller said.

Later, spruce gum became a big business, with 300,000 pounds being produced in Maine around the turn of the last century. Fragrant balsam fir pillows came to be one of the most common tourist novelties and helped create dozens of small factories around Maine.

Today there are still a couple of balsam fir pillow factories, including Paine Products and Incense Co.in Auburn and Maine Balsam Fir Products in West Paris. But Nadeau is apparently the only purveyor of spruce gum, which Fuller, a big fan since he was a boy, admits is an acquired taste, kind of like Moxie.

Nadeau said that, even at 71 and with some health conditions, he still gets out in the woods to collect. But he also buys things from other foragers. He buys his birch bark from local loggers and other items from people around the world. Most of the items offered on his website are raw materials, but he also sells other forest-related crafts and products produced by local people.

“A business such as mine is motivated by love of nature. It may have the potential to develop further but it becomes a totally different animal as it morphs. By having a global internet market and a very diverse product base, much of which is obtained at very low cost, it remains feasible as a cottage industry. It cannot support a family,” he said.

Part of Dave Fuller's collection of balsam fir pillows. (Photo: The Rankin File)Nadeau said he finds the business interesting “because of the customers that I deal with.” They include craftspeople, exotic cooks, herbalists, and pet owners. He's sold pine pitch to grinders of telescopic lenses, for instance. And, he's the “only purveyor of the spruce gum experience in the world, to my knowledge.”

He said he sells black bear “oil” (basically, rendered bear fat) all over the world. It's especially popular in Arab countries. While he says on his website it's used to help grow hair, he acknowledges it probably doesn't. Birch bark is mainly used as a laminate or covering for crafting or furniture making, said Nadeau, though he believes it has potential as medicine.

While the use of non-timber forest products has a long history, Fuller thinks it could have a better future.

“Quite often it's seasonal and it lends itself well to seasonal craft fairs. You look at Christmas tree ornaments. A lot them are made in China. I emphasize the tourist industry. We get 35 million people visiting the state of Maine a year and they drop $1.2 billion dollars. That's retail dollars, not motel and everything else. I maintain they come to Maine to buy Maine stuff. When I travel to Italy I'm not looking to buy things from China,” Fuller said.

Fuller said he's gone into gift shops and found hiking sticks from China. “And this state is covered with trees.”

Now there's a product with potential, he said. Tens of millions of baby boomers are now heading into their sixties. As you get older the joints are the first to go. What do you need to help propel you along? Right . . . a hiking stick. Maine could supply hiking sticks to a good portion of that aging population just by judicious pre-commercial thinning of hardwood stands.

Fuller says non-timber forest products fit right into the local food and fair trade products movements. He said there needs to be a study of tourist preferences. Do they really prefer locally produced items?

While useful and decorative items from the forest have to be competitively priced, what Fuller has found out in his research is that craftspeople from Maine to Minnesota and beyond almost invariably under price their products. He routinely sees carefully crafted things, whether it's a birch bark photo frame or delicate basket or an beautifully designed twig wreath with dried flowers and seed pods from indigenous Maine plants, priced for only a few bucks when it should be selling for many times that.

To a certain extent it's marketing. And that's where Fuller says some Mainers need help, learning how to read markets and price their goods so they get a fair return for their labor. The internet, however, has made marketing easier. On the internet you can tell your story, and the story of your personal product, in a way you can't in other media, and thus differentiate yourself from the herd, said Fuller. People want to relate to the person they're buying from these days.

Birch bark decorations in Dave Fuller's collection. (Photo: The Rankin File)One of the things producers need to emphasize is locally made . . . locally made . . . locally made. Also, that it's a sustainable use of the forest. On its website, Worcester Wreath notes the fact that no balsam firs are felled for their wreaths, that only the tips, which regenerate, are taken.

Of course, when you harvest things from the wild, there's always the danger of over harvesting, particularly if a use becomes quite popular.

Nadeau said he doesn't harvest rare or protected plants and never harvests anything in large quantities. “I refuse to deal with anyone who depletes the ecosystem or does not respect the environment. I always ask landowners permission to harvest on their land,” he said.

The researchers who studied use of non-timber forest products in the St. John Valley found that most of the gatherers they interviewed felt the same way. They cautioned that it's important to understand the plant you're collecting, for instance. Consider whether it's abundant or rate, and take that into account when deciding how much you really need. And also consider that it isn't only humans who use many plants, so do wildlife. Leave enough for them.

Fuller holds a creative sculpture of natural materials. (Photo: The Rankin File)Fiddleheads get harvested pretty hard. Fuller did a multi-year study on a patch and found that the plants that were over harvested – where all the fronds were taken, even if only once a year, declined or died within four years, while the plants that underwent a single partial harvest in a year continued to be as healthy as ones that weren't harvested at all. It's a cautionary note.

That being said, non-forest products do have economic potential.

“I think we need to capitalize on the fact that we're the most forested state in the United States,” Fuller said. “I think there's some potential for unexplored medicinal uses of forest plants and trees. We need to look more closely at it. The University of Maine has recently started doing this.”

Most non-timber products from the forest are unlikely to spawn huge industries.

But, as a whole, it does “have the potential to put food on the table, to help people pay their taxes,” to provide a supplementary income said Fuller. And, beyond that, it could help the forest itself. If people in these troubled times can see a possibility that their woods could generate a little income, they may be less inclined to sell. And forest fragmentation would be reduced.

Joe Rankin lives in New Sharon. The non-timber forest products he harvests from his 75-acre woodlot include copious photographs, quietude, and a feeling of oneness with the earth.

By Joe Rankin

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

In the mid-'60s Eric Sloane wrote “A Reverence for Wood,” a tribute to the importance of wood in early American life.

It's lovingly illustrated with Sloane's skillfully detailed pen and ink sketches of everything wood: burl mallets, basswood berry boxes, up-and-down sawmills, timber frame barns. Butter churns and wooden sap buckets; charcoal making and shingle riving. It's a book that can make you nostalgic for a time you never knew, and one whose hardships you couldn't imagine.

Sloane said he got the idea for that book while flying over a wooded landscape with a friend, who warned him if he was going to write it he should hurry “while there are still some trees left.”

The friend pointed to the blur of an expanding New York City on the horizon, and then told him “trees and wood are on their way out. Everything is metal and plastic these days.”

But Sloane didn't buy it. “Certainly we don't see as much wood as we once did. Yet wood is still with us,” in products we use every day, he wrote in the introduction to “A Reverence for Wood.” “It may be that after we have spent a century or two in expending our wealth of wood to seek the riches of other planets, we will realize that our greatest wealth was right here on earth after all.”

Sloane and his friend are both right.

A page from author/illustrator Eric Sloane's "A Reverence for Wood."The friend, High Weidinger, accurately foresaw that wood was doomed to be elbowed aside by plastics in many applications and tree-covered landscapes would give way to house-covered ones as population increased. Sloane was right in that wood is just perfect for many uses, and that new ones for this versatile material will continue emerging.

Wood, it seems, is the raw material of the future as well as the past.

“Wood and wood-based materials and products are expected to be as important to society in the 21^st century as they have been in the 20^th century,” a quartet of U.S. Forest Service researchers wrote in a 2009 paper titled “Uses and Desirable Properties of Wood in the 21^st Century.”

Traditional forest products, they conclude, “will continue to be produced in large

volumes,” but evolving to become “more multifunctional and durable without losing the ability to be recycled and reused.” In addition, wood will find new uses in energy, chemical production and even nanotechnology as the century progresses, the researchers predicted.

Wood made civilization.

This versatile, malleable, easily transportable, renewable material came in untold varieties with hugely different properties. It could be crafted into ten thousand useful and beautiful things. From the longbow and the spear to hoes, carts, houses, fences. Into casks for wine and ships to transport it in. Into charcoal for cooking. The list was endless.

Pottery was wood's main competitor in the early days of human history, later joined by metal: first bronze, then iron. And, a few decades before Sloane's book came out, plastics. The rising material star, rivaling wood in its immense variety and myriad uses, plastic became a replacement for wood, metal and pottery in many items.

Without half trying you can probably think of a hundred things that only a few decades ago used to be made of wood, but are now more commonly plastic or metal: coffee stirrers, hammer handles, archery bows, skis, house siding, lobster traps and chicken crates, golf tees. There are even aluminum baseball bats and steel studs.

It's a logical, and perhaps inevitable, evolution. And there is no doubt that plastics will gain ground in many applications for some time to come.

“Some of the substitutes for wood, even though they may be more expensive, are really just lower maintenance and more serviceable from a customer standpoint,” said Lloyd Irland, a forest economist and president of The Irland Group, a Maine forestry analysis and consulting firm.

“The best example is vinyl and aluminum siding. Even some of the major lumber companies are now manufacturing those. If you look back to the mid '80s, 45 percent of the homes built in this country received some type of wood exterior cladding. Now it's below 10 percent. I think that's likely to persist, at least until people think scraping and painting siding is fun.”

When it comes right down to it, many of the things once made of wood and now made of plastic are little things, Irland notes, often low cost or even given away free. That reflects basic economics.

“For monstrous production runs plastic is cheaper than wood. For small production runs wood is cheaper,” he said. But those production runs are even cheaper when they're made in places like China, Vietnam or India.

While the outside of your house may be clad in vinyl, the skeleton is more likely to be made of wood in the form of dimensional lumber, the seemingly ubiquitous two-by spruce and fir. “The dominant framing for most residential and light housing construction is wood. That's not going to change,” said Irland. “What is going to change is the form in which we use wood. Instead of two-by-twelves we're using I joists.”

Laminated veneer lumber is one example of how the product changes, but the use remains the same. LVL joins wafer board, or oriented strand board, and the even older plywood among the “engineered wood” products available today.

“With laminated veneer lumber you can make long beams. Some engineered products have really been a boon to the wood industry because you can take relatively poor quality wood, debark it, waferize it or veneer it and make these products out of it,” said Peter Lammert, who spent 33 years as the Maine Forest Service's utilization forester and who probably knows more about Maine mills, their products and their markets than anyone else.

And sometimes it's just using the same thing a different way.

“When I first started (with the MFS in 1976) there weren't many trusses. Now the truss business is a major component of the building industry. I'm familiar with a building today where they're building 50-foot trusses for the roof. The trusses will be four feet apart, made of two-by-fours and engineered for a Maine snowload,” Lammert said. “And so engineering has brought about a lot of these changes, including these structural marvels of trusses that don't use as much wood as the old-fashioned buildings.”

Comparisons of present and future renewable energy sources (Graphic: U.S. Department of Energy)“Wood is always going to have uses. And I think it will enjoy a renaissance when the green movement is waking people up and saying that wood is a renewable resource,” Lammert added.

It's easy to overlook many of the ways we use wood these days, says Irland.

“A lot of wood use is invisible. A perfect example is pallets. People say, 'I don't use wood.' But how do they think their groceries get to the grocery store?” Irland asked.

Irland predicts paper use in the United States will continue to fall to the lower levels more common in Europe and other developed areas of the world. But he's bullish on cardboard and paperboard packaging: “I don't think that's going away anytime soon.”

In fact, Irland points out that cardboard performs some of the same functions that lumber and even pottery did in centuries and millennia past. “All of this stuff comes into the grocery store in big cardboard cartons. We don't use butter firkins and barrels, but we use cardboard and all just the same way. The cardboard box is a pretty damn powerful product, when you think about it.”

Both Lammert and Irland agree that there will be further advances in engineered woods that could lead to those types of products supplanting sawn lumber in many applications. “There will be some more ingenious stuff coming from the engineered wood industry,” Lammert said, pointing to Huber Engineered Wood's moisture resistant AdvanTech line of flooring and sheathing as an example.

Another area where wood use is expected to grow is fuel. Of course, humans have been warming themselves with wood since the first proto-human cozied up to a lightning-struck burning tree.

Tens of thousands of New Englanders heat their homes with wood, whether it's traditional split firewood or the newer version, wood pellets. The U.S. has had a wood pellet industry since the 1930s, but it's only in the last half a decade or so that demand has jumped with the rise in the cost of fuel oil and propane. According to a 2009 report on the wood pellet industry by the U.S. Forest Service, in that year there were 110 pellet mills on line or about to become operational in the U.S. and Canada and “the outlook is positive for further expansion of demand,” the report said.

Colorado biofuel refinery (Photo: U.S. Department of Energy)Co-firing of wood biomass with coal at commercial power plants is expected to become more common and wood is poised to become the “leading U.S. source of non-hydroelectric power generation in the decades ahead,” according to the Forest Service's forecast for wood use in the 21^st century.

And technologies are now being developed to produce liquid biofuels from wood. In Maine, Old Town Fuel & Fiber is building a production refinery to produce such biofuels from spent pulping liquors.

Another area where wood use is expected to grow is using wood to produce chemicals and pharmaceuticals, according to the Forest Service's report on future wood use. The paper noted that federal energy analysts forecast that the chemical industry will “increase use of renewable biomass materials fivefold by 2020 and another fivefold again by 2050 and renewable biomass will reach use parity with fossil hydrocarbons by 2050.

“This represents an important opportunity for wood-based materials, because the value of chemical products from renewable raw materials in 2020 is estimated to be over $400 billion,” the Forest Service report said, noting that producing chemical feedstocks could likely be done in the same mill where liquid biofuels are produced.

Then – and this is a real far cry from barrels and burl mallets – there's the mating of nanotechnology and wood. Nanotechnology, simply speaking, is manipulating materials at the molecular scale, engineering particular properties into them.

Nanotechnology could, for instance, be used to develop “intelligent” wood or paper that could monitor forces and loads, moisture and other factors; or new pharmaceutical products or self-sterilizing surfaces; or wood that is substantially stronger, according to the Forest Service report on 21^st century wood use.

Nanotechnology is such a new science that where it goes is anybody's guess, but the potential is there for wood to benefit greatly.

Of course, exactly how American, and Maine, forest products companies and tree farmers capitalize on these recent and emerging trends and how much they benefit will depend on myriad factors, not the least of which is the chaotic, ever-shifting globalized market for wood and wood products. Another is the trees themselves: how fast they grow, what their properties are.

In other words, what the forest of the future looks like.

That could be heavily influenced by climate change and invasive insects. The emerald ash borer, Asian long-horned beetle, and other forest pests could have a profound effect on wood's – and the U.S. forest products industry's -- future. Just consider what happened to the American chestnut, and the American elm. And given that a new forest pest enters the U.S. every two or three years, reading those tea leaves is next to impossible.

Many of the future uses of wood will require trees with specific traits. Competitive biofuels, the Forest Service researchers said, will “depend on development of desirable wood properties and high biomass productivity under sustainable low-input conditions.” In other words, breeding and growing of trees that will be easy to turn into biofuels.

It's going to be genomics-meets-forestry. The authors of the Forest Service report point out that “genomics research with forest trees is accelerating,” with genes being pinpointed that control everything from branch angle to lignin content to wood color. And, if they can pinpoint it, they might, eventually, be able to manipulate it. In other words, designer trees. And you thought GM corn was controversial.

With all the talk predicted high-tech future uses of wood – engineered woods, nanotech, biofuels – a person might wonder whether there's going to be a market for high-quality solid wood furniture, of the kind that gets lovingly passed down from generation to generation before ending in an art gallery or museum someplace a few hundred years hence. The kind of table, say, that glows softly in the light. The kind that you can't resist running your hand across to feel it's warmth and explore its beauty with hand and eye.

Absolutely, said Irland.

“Wood will always be in demand, but the demand is going to shift based on society's needs. There will be new technologies. New ideas. Those I joists are still made out of wood, just engineered in a different way. But the pharaohs had themselves buried in wooden caskets. It's a metaphor for how wood remains a high end item,” said Irland.

Probably, centuries from now, a starship captain's private cabin will feature a beautiful, and prized, handcrafted cherry or teak desk in a sea of plastic, metal and other substances we can't guess at now.

But perhaps nothing speaks to our love of real wood, and its enduring appeal, like the fact that imitators, whether that budget medium density fiberboard computer desk or the recycled plastic “lumber” on your back deck, have printed overlays or surface texturing that look like wood grain.

Joe Rankin is a woodturner and small woodland owner who heats his renovated Cape with firewood he cuts himself. 

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

Jim walked slowly up the path, as he had done ten thousand times before. Almost every day for decades. Through the woods. His woods, he thought. But . . . not really his. Just The Woods. It was a crisp, fall day. Red maples, golden beech, purple ash against the almost black evergreens. The ferns at his feet had turned bronze. It was autumn for him too. He turned 88 two weeks ago. He knew he wouldn't live forever. His beloved woodlands would go on, of course. He hoped they would, anyway.

His father had deeded him the first 50 acres after he got back from the war in the Pacific. He had inherited the rest of the old man's land when he died in '71. Jim had gone into insurance after the war, but his heart was with his woods. He nurtured trees, improved the roads, logged to improve the stands, built trails, planted apple trees for the deer. He watched the trees mature and flourish, reveled in the wildlife that called them home. Took long walks there.

Light in the forest (Photo: The Rankin File)Even before his father died he was buying more woodland. In the '50s and '60s the price was right, and he couldn't see it going down. His beloved Esther just shook her head. But she indulged him. They lived simply, after all. Logs and pulp helped pay for the kids' college. Beyond that, the forest nurtured his spirit. During the low times he went for long walks in the woods.

One of those times came in '83, when Esther fell ill. It was long, drawn out. Painful for her and him. He held her hand a lot. The kids had moved away after college. One lived in Maryland now, one in New Mexico, one in Columbus, Ohio. They all had good jobs. City jobs. Gave him grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He still had the old house, still had the collie. And the woods.

But what would happen to the woods when he went? It had been gnawing at him. Jim knew he could sell the land now. But it would be like selling a friend. He didn't need the cash. He still lived simply. He was at home here. He could leave it to the kids . . . But he didn't think they were interested. Growing up they were out in the woods all the time. Afterward, not so much. On visits home they tended to change the subject when he started talking trees. Splitting it between them didn't seem right. Giving it to one didn't seem fair. He'd like the acreage to stay whole. To stay green. The whole question had become difficult, unrelenting. It needed to be dealt with. Sooner, rather than later. He had a doctor's appointment in three days. Somehow, he didn't think the news was going to be good.

In one sense, Jim is fictional. In another, he is a composite. In reality, his story is so close to that of tens of thousands of American forest lland owners that it could, with a couple of tweaks, literally be their story.

When it comes to woodlands, and woodland ownership, the United States may be in the middle of one of the greatest transitions since the settling of the continent by Europeans. Forest landowners who have held on to their property, harvested it and maintained it for decades and kept it intact, are aging. Many have made no provisions for the future of their lands.

“I feel that the aging of America's forest landowners is one of the more pressing national issues we're seeing right now,” said Brett Butler, a research forester for the U.S. Forest Service and the author of Family Forest Owners of the U.S.

Tom Doak, the executive director of the Small Woodland Owners Association of Maine, agrees: “This generational transfer is probably the biggest change related to forests that there is. But it's hidden. It happens 20 and 50 and 300 acres at a time.”

Doak says large forestland sales make the headlines because they're big, but they generally mark the transfer between one large landowner and another. The land stays as woodland, the use doesn't change. That isn't necessarily so when you're talking family forestland, which is concentrated in the southern, and more populated, two-thirds of Maine, he said.

The numbers tell a story in themselves.

Butler said that, nationally, 20 percent of family forestland is owned by people 75 years and older. Another 30 percent by people between 55 and 65. In Maine there are more than 120,000 small woodland owners, and two-thirds of them are 55 or older. Forty percent of those small woodlands are held by people 65 and older.

That's not to imply that 55, or 65, or even 75 is “old” in this second decade of the 21^st century. People are living longer. And, by and large, they are healthier, more vital. But it is a reality that increasing age brings more . . . uncertainty.

“As you age, the probability of the passing of the land to the next generation increases,” said Butler. “Many of these landowners are not sure what the future of the land is going to be, who the next owners will be or how they're going to treat it. One thing that is very common, almost universal, among family forest owners is a deep love of the land. They want to do what's right. And many want the woods to stay as woods. And some are not certain that will happen.”

For society this so-called “inter-generational transfer” is an important issue, say experts in forest landownership. Because it's at that point that other changes can occur.

“When the land changes hands, that is when there is a great probability of a change occurring in the land use. If it is going to be developed or parcelized, that is when it is more likely to happen. It is a critical junction we are at,” said Butler. “We are seeing parcelization occurring all across the United States. There is a greater number of family forest landowners with small pieces.”

“I think the uses of land are different now,” said Doak. “The idea was that woodland was woodland. Its value was 90 percent in the timber, 10 percent in the land. Those numbers are flipped right now. Land can be used for a lot of things other than growing timber. In past generations it was going to stay woodland. But there are pressures on land that didn't exist before. That doesn't mean it's going to happen. It means it can happen.”

The implications of breaking down woodlands into smaller chunks are many.

They include a reduction in the wood supply as parcels become too small to harvest or their owners don't bother, a proliferation in invasive species because new landowners don't see a need or have the time to learn about or combat them, and a shrinking of the land available for recreation as owners of smaller lots tack up “no trespassing” signs.

Everyone is aware of the differences between generations. There are different values there.

 New owners, new values

Experts say the nation's older family forest landowners are likely to have a deep connection to the land. Many have owned it for decades and maintained it as forestland. The new owners, whether it is their children, or a purchaser, aren't as likely to have that connection, or even view the woods in quite the same way.

 In the best of all worlds, transfers of woodland – sales or bequests – are planned. In the real world, too often they are not.

The Family Forest Program in the University of Maine's Center for Research on Sustainable Forests has done four different surveys since 2008 that looked at forest landowner demographics in Maine. Two were statewide, the others focused on Penobscot and Kennebec counties.

Jessica Leahy, who studies and teaches about the “human dimensions” of forest resources at the University of Maine, said those surveys show that while “a majority of landowners are taking care of the legal and financial transfer of their property to their heirs” some 41 percent haven't even made out a simple will.

Ages of family forest landowners in the U.S. 2006 (Graphic: U.S. Forest Service)“In our recent Kennebec County study, we were surprised to discover that 16 percent of our landowners were not sure who would inherit their land when they pass away. That is a concern,” Leahy said in an e-mail interview. “When we asked people who did not have a will, trust, or estate plan why they had not yet taken action, the top three statements made were, 'I will get a will when I am older,' 'I will get a will if I get sick,' and 'I don't want to think about getting a will."

Basic human nature. Making a will means confronting the inevitability of death.

Leahy said her data also show that landowners are transferring forest land to their heirs without talking about how they want it cared for.

“Nearly 60 percent of the landowners in our recent survey wanted their heirs to keep the land the same as they have. But it's not clear that the heirs have any way of knowing this since 73 percent of landowners have not spoken to their heirs about their wishes,” she said. Only 1 percent have put anything to that effect in writing.

Leahy said one time she was present when a father talked to his adult daughter about that subject. Leahy remembers starting the discussion by asking what she thought was a simple question: have you two talked about your wishes for the land when you're gone?

“The daughter was quick to respond with a 'No . . . So, dad, what do you want us to do with the land?' And the discussion went from there. I wish more landowners would have this discussion with their heirs, even though it is a tough conversation to have.”

Leahy said another major concern is the number of heirs who are likely to get a chunk of any given parcel. In the Family Forest Program's survey of Kennebec County landowners, 24 percent said they were planning to give it to three people. Another 14 percent said they planned to give it to four – or more.

“Combined, this suggests that at least 38 percent of the land will go to more landowners than they currently have now,” said Leahy. “Many of us believe that there will be more family conflicts and more difficulties in keeping forests as forests because of how many 'cooks in the kitchen' are projected.”

Leahy's research also found that almost a quarter of Kennebec County survey respondents said they are “extremely concerned,” about estate taxes.

  Taxes and land trusts

SWOAM's Tom Doak said revamping the estate tax should be a priority for society if it wants to keep forests as forests for timber, recreation, and open space. In Maine many people are not rich in dollars, but their land is valuable. The estate tax, he said, forces the “carving up of woodland” to cover that tax bill.

There also needs to be a recognition said Doak, that the “new owner profile is not the old owner profile” and that government programs of the past that were largely geared toward timber production might need supplementing or replacing with new ones that address the values of a new generation of woodland owners.

He also said local and state governments need to make it easier to own forestland. The Tree Growth Tax Law, a current use tax program, is under almost perpetual assault, he said.

Doak added that attitudes toward forest landowners and their concerns vary widely throughout the state. Some Maine towns go out of their way to work with forest landowners, others don't, he said. “If we want them to hold on to it and keep it as woodland then we've got to find ways to make it easier and more enjoyable to do that,” he said.

Concerns about how their land will be treated and cared for and used, and worries about the estate tax have boosted interest in SWOAM's land trust, and Doak said he anticipates that interest to blossom over the next few years.

The organization now holds 13 easements on almost 3,500 acres and owns outright over 3,000 acres, said Doak. “We have three closings coming up in the next month. And we're dealing with a landowner with over 1,900 acres right now.”

“The people we tend to deal with have lifetime commitments to their property, but they're beginning to think what happens after they're gone. They're saying, I have 30 years or 50 years of my life in this property and I want to know that somehow that gets carried on. They don't trust the kids. And, they want to see long-term management continue,” Doak said.

Asked to boil down the aging landowner issue into one sentence, Leahy said: “We don't need more foresters, we need more family counselors.”

People who have cared for a parcel of woodland for decades have such an intense connection with it that it's hard for them to talk about, she said. “A well-cared for piece of land – that because of a landowner's hard work is better now than when they started – that's a legacy. And we have a hard time talking about our legacy,” she said.

She would like to see family counselors who are trained in holding family meetings where the land is the focus. “In my ideal world, landowners would know and feel comfortable bringing these counselors on board to help them define and then share their wishes.”

One outgrowth of the new interest in the aging forest landowner is the number of programs designed to aid them in figuring out how to deal with the issue, said Butler, the Forest Service researcher.

Estate planning resources

One is called Ties to the Land. Run out of Oregon State University. It aims to give family forest landowners the tools to ensure that the transition of their property to the next generation is a smooth one.

Path in the woods (Photo: The Rankin File)The U.S. Forest Service has a very comprehensive publication titled Estate Planning for Forest Landowners: What Will Become of Your Timberland? Similarly, University of Massachusetts Extension has a valuable publication on the issue called Your Land, Your Legacy that can be accessed online. You can find information about the SWOAM Land Trust online as well.

A soon-to-be unveiled online course for Maine woodland owners called The Woodland Steward Program will address estate planning issues as part of the broader topic of woodland finances. The project is being developed by The New England Forestry Foundation, SWOAM and the Maine TREE Foundation.

If you want more information about the issue in general, Butler's Family Forest Owners of the United States is available online. And he and collaborator Zhao Ma wrote an insightful article titled Family Forest Owner Trends in the Northern United States for the Society of American Foresters. You can also access the Family Forest Program at Maine’s School of Forest Resources.

The issue of inter-generational forestland transfer is a critical one, and, while the U.S. might be smack in the middle of the trend, it's not going to be over quickly.

“It's a continuous process. It will continue for the next 10 to 20 years. People are living longer, so that will extend it, though we will hit a climax, of course,” said Butler. He's hopeful it will work out for the forest. He notes that family forestland owners tend to be what he calls “self-selecting.” You generally acquire or keep forestland because you want it, not to get rich.

Leahy said she's “actually optimistic that the next generation of landowners will be bitten by the same stewardship bug as our current generation of small woodlot owners. There is something about caring for the forest that calls to people. I don't have the data to back this up, because it is that spark you see in people's eye when they talk about their land, and I can't measure that.”

Joe Rankin was somewhat startled to realize that he's an aging forest landowner himself. He writes, farms, keeps bees and walks his dogs in his woods in New Sharon.

By JOE RANKIN

Forests for Maine's Future Writer

Allen “Higmo” Higgins, asked what forest stewardship means to him, barely pauses.

“The biggest thing is, you can't have it all. You can't have a quick harvest, all kinds of money in your pocket in the first five minutes, plus look at the long term. The long-term health of my forest is more important than anything. I'm not going to be here in 100 years, but this forest will be here in 100 years and there's no reason it can't be better than it was when I took it over.”

Can't have it all? No quick buck?

Those are words you don't hear too often in these days of the quick buck and mindless consumerism, disposable technology and a focus on short-term profits. Higgins, Maine's 2011 Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year, might as well be speaking a different language.

Forest stewardship is not a best practices manual. It's a state of mind. An attitude. A mindset. An outlook. An ethic.

Allen Higgins and Paula Hersom (Joe Rankin photo)And it could be a threatened species. At a time when it's more important than ever, says Tom Doak, the executive director of the Small Woodland Owners Association of Maine, one of the Forests for Maine's Future collaborators.

“It's important because of the changing values of landowners, and the turnover of land, because people are more mobile and the forestland ownership is aging. The tenure of ownership is shorter. And ethics take some time to develop. For some it's not necessarily an automatic,” said Doak.

He notes that in decades past people lived closer to the land, depending on their particular piece of it for more for the basic necessities of life. They grew up on, and with, a piece of land and later inherited it. That tended to foster the feeling of a relationship that extends through time. They could envision handing it off to their children and wanted to offer it in better shape than they found it.

These days, said Doak, people acquire a piece of land, but often haven't been exposed to that type of ethos. They buy or inherit a tract of forest, and want to take care of it, but don't know how. Many think that caring for the woods means doing nothing, he said, when in fact, judicious logging and other practices can actually create a healthier, more productive forest.

But fostering a forest steward's mindset isn't as easy as legislating rules for wood harvesting. And too much regulation can be counterproductive, Doak said, discouraging people from wanting to own forestland, which is already challenging enough: dealing with motorized vehicles, midnight dumping, trespassing, and then coming up with the tax money.

Doak says if society values good forest stewardship it needs to rethink its relationship with landowners, working with them. He thinks the state could learn a lot from Maine's snowmobile clubs, which have built a solid relationship with landowners by listening to them, hearing their concerns, and speaking out on issues that affect them.

But Doak admits that spreading and rejuvenating the complex, yet subtle mindset that is forest stewardship in the next generation of landowners will be a challenge, and that there's no easy answer.

Higgins and his partner, Paula Hersom, are sitting on a log in their woods in Brunswick, Around them huge white pines reach for a blue sky. Under the pines is a carpet of . . . pines, so thick they almost look like grass. The next generation of trees, or even the next after that.

Higgins and Hersom, and Higgins' sister Marcia, run Higmo's Lumber, Music and Logging in Brunswick. It is a two-skidder logging operation, a circular sawmill, and a 90-acre tree farm.

The land off Bridge Road goes back in Higgins's family and not so long ago was part of the declining dairy farm where he grew up. Higgins was a working as a mechanic for one of the local “dirt guys” in the late 1990s when he decided to set up a sawmill in the location where his father's sawmill stood when it burned in the 1950's.

What started as a hobby quickly grew into a business.

Now the mill's 52-inch blade saws a quarter of a million board feet of lumber a year for sale to local homeowners, contractors, and even wooden boatbuilders. Low grade wood is sold as pulp. The three are the only employees, driving the skidders and trucks, running the mill – and taking care of the land.

“I'm just carrying on the same tradition of what my dad and grandfather believed in. Which was, let's not rape the land. Mother Nature will take care of it herself if we don't go in there and do too much to mess it up. Mother Nature knows how to grow a forest, so let's work with her, not against her. The soil will tell you what it wants to grow,” Higgins said.

“My father was a big believer in selective cutting. All he ever did was selective cut. He was looking to weed out something that was overgrown or low grade. I've done the same thing.”

The 80 or 90 acres Higgins now tends was pretty much left to fend for itself through the 1980s and 1990s, before he took it over and began more active management. The forest is mostly white and pitch pines, oaks, a little cedar. Higmo has thinned trees, and laid out permanent skid trails and a log yard. He said when they log a section they try to do what needs to be done there for at least the next decade and a half. Repeated messing around, he says, would play havoc with the next generation of trees.

Higgins says cultivating a forest stewardship ethic means cultivating yourself as much as the land.

Education is a key ingredient, said Higgins, who said he has taken advantage of all sorts of opportunities to learn from the experts, and who now tries to pass that on. This year he will host the 57^th Annual Tree Farm/SWOAM Forestry Field Day at his place in Brunswick on Sept. 10. He also hosts an annual Saw Mill Days at Higmo's in November.

Education also means getting to know your land, he said. Spend time there. Look around. See how the trees grow. What grows where. How the sunlight hits.

Another key: slowing down.

“I think my biggest priority long term is to leave it as good or better than I found it when I'm gone. That means planning accordingly. Don't walk in the forest and say, 'you know, I think I'd like a trail right here and we ought to cut it right now.' It takes many trips to make that kind of decision. It's like measuring logs. When you drop a tree and limb it, that's the wrong time to measure logs.

“If you're acting in haste there's a problem. It's going to take 70 to 90 years to grow a tree for sawlogs. If you're taking five seconds to decide what to do with it once you've dropped it, that's the wrong answer. You have to slow down a little bit. And it's a hard thing to slow down. The economy makes you want to crank. It wants to make you go fast. But it's never the right thing.”

Higgins said the most important thing his forest has taught him is patience.

Higmo in the sawmill (Joe Rankin photo)“Impatience always leads to wrong decisions, whether it's the business or the woods themselves. It's kind of a weird combination. To survive as a small business you have to be a go-getter, but at the same time you have to make the right decisions and to do that you have to be patient.”

For Josiah Pierce, forest stewardship isn't something you can learn so much as absorb . . . from the forest itself.

“What's needed is the desire, and the desire comes from being out in the woods and seeing how beautiful it is. Once you have the desire you go for the knowledge. Knowledge of which plants you try to control – multiflora rose, Japanese knotweed. And what you encourage and how you encourage it. Knowing what's right for a particular area and soils, where the hemlock grows best and the white pine grows best,” Pierce said.

Pierce and his wife Kathy were the National Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year in 2007. It's a signal honor.

Jo Pierce manages some 2,000 acres in Baldwin. Its core is 360 acres that he's the sixth generation in his family to own.

“My father, from when I was a young boy convinced me that I loved the woods and loved the farm and was going to take care of it. He gave me some land while he was still alive and I bought some land. So now I own land myself and own land with my sister and own land with my son.”

For him, forest stewardship means “handing on the land to the next generation, or the next generation after that in the same or better shape than I received it. It means that when I die the next generation will be able to to cut trees and pay the taxes and make a little profit. That's one really important thing. But in with that is also that I'll see that there will be a mixture of trees, there will be animals, up and down the food chain, a mixture of plants and that the water above the ground and under it will be clean.”

While Pierce believes a person can pick up the forest stewardship ethic at any time in life, he says it can also be handed down from parent to child. What it takes is time: in the woods.

“Encourage your children to play in the woods and walk in the woods. I was exposed to my father and his love of the woods. Just being out there in the woods with them is important. If it takes it takes, if it doesn't it doesn't. But they'll see and understand that it's a part of them,” said Pierce, who has a son who lives nearby who is interested in the woods. His other two children live out of state.

His advice to those who want to learn how a good forest steward relates to the land is the same: get out and walk in the woods with those who have a reputation for taking care of the forest.

Also, Pierce advises, seek out organizations like SWOAM, which are committed to fostering that ethic, and get advice from a forester. Read, he said. And, learn your trees, how to recognize them, not just by the leaves, but the bark.

But Pierce advises not just learning about your woods, but about yourself. It will help foster the proper perspective.

“It's something to do with the woods are larger than me. They're more important than me. They were there before I was born and will be after I'm dead. I've learned to think long term. I've said 100 years back and 100 years ahead . . . I've learned about time and my importance. And I'm relatively unimportant,” he said.